Responding to a post after my own heart . . . well, parts of it anyway . . . certainly the intention of creating a positive trance-based experience as a context for a recreational intensively imagined experience for entertainment for the Hypnosis Technique Exchange:

How easy to install, how convincing, and how long lasting are false memories?

Depends upon just exactly what you’re trying to do.

However, you might be reminded that creating permanent false memories . . . whether for recreational or therapeutic reasons . . . is not really the best way to go about this sort of thing. When you create a false memory, you are also invariably repressing the real memories. Anytime we repress, we create a negative relationship to the original emotions and memories. Invariably, the system breaks down.

While past discussion on the subject of memory replacement, artificial repression, and the like, have been aimed primarily at therapeutic rather than recreational or entertainment uses of the concept, much of the caveats still apply.

Before you start thinking about how you can change people’s permament memories and replace them with long scenarios or radical changes, you might want to take a peek at a number of past posts on the subject:

• Memory Replacement Therapy
• Memory Replacement Therapy . . . sidebar
• Memory Replacement Therapy and Transgenderism . . . sidebar on responsibility
• Memory Replacement Therapy and Transgenderism . . . sidebar on which is worse?
• Hypnotic Memory Erasure . . . Artificial Repression . . . No Eternal Sunshine, No Spotless Mind
• Freedom of Choice . . . and the client in therapeutic relationships

When working with memory and indentity systems – of which our memories are an integral part – it is a very good idea to think of the entire system and how the parts relate to it.

Don’t get discouraged, what you are asking for is not wholly outside the realm of a workable expeience:

Was watching Total Recall over the weekend and thought what a nice concept for a business; to give someone the memories of a great Vegas vacation or a relaxing week in Mexico, all with their consent and after much legal paperwork, of course.

I enjoyed that movie as well. However, you will note that while the experience was interesting, the character’s memory and experience system began to break down as the fantasy experience and the reality experience became overlapped and the programming began to cause real personality conflicts for the character. Yes, the movie made it seem like it was all a kind of lady-or-the-tiger experience where we were left wondering which experience was real, which reality was the genuine deal and which was the implant. However, it is also obvious that with two overlapping experiences that were both trying to assert themselves as the genuine event which would then affect the subject’s personality, problems . . . big time problems . . . came out.

Rather than go with an implanted false memory experience, I would suggest that a vicarious virtual experience would be more worthwhile. That is, instead of trying to force the mind to believe an experinece is the real deal replacing other experiences, instead go with an hypnotic experience that creates a recreational experinece that is experienced "as if" it were real . . . complete with hyperempiria, hyperacutity, and full on sensory recall . . . but do the framing as a virtual or vicarious experience . . . an hypnotic holonovel, if you will.

Take a look at some of my past posts on this subject to get the idea:

• Vicarious Experiential Memory Machine
• Hyperacuity and Hyperempiria
• What is Hyperempiria?
• T R A N C E P L A Y . . . Hypnotic Holonovels and Games and Art . . . Trance-Based Hypnotic Virtual Reality

I hope this has been helpful. Play around a bit with the basic concepts and then feel free to post comments or questions.

All the best,
Brian

Brian David Phillips, PhD, CH [phillips@nccu.edu.tw]Certified Hypnotherapist
Associate Professor, NCCU, Taipei, Taiwan
http://www.briandavidphillips.com