Dolores Cannon

An icebreaker

A hypnotherapist spent forty-six years recording what clients said under trance, mostly detailed accounts of past lives. She built a method and a teaching from those sessions; memory researchers warn hypnosis can build a false memory as easily as recover a real one.

Ask one of these · tap to take it

How much would you trust a memory recovered under hypnosis?
What draws people to stories of not quite belonging here?
Does a method need proof to comfort someone genuinely?
Where's the line between reporting a claim and believing it?

copy the questions

Worth knowing · 1 of 5

How did her work begin?

She began working with hypnosis in the late 1960s, starting from ordinary relaxation sessions. Clients, she said, kept slipping past that into voices and memories that did not seem to be their own.

Worth knowing · 2 of 5

What method did she develop from this?

She developed a specific hypnosis technique for guiding clients into a deep trance state. She later trained and certified other practitioners in it, and used it to record thousands of sessions over her career.

Worth knowing · 3 of 5

What did she publish in 2011?

In a book that year, she wrote that a call went out for help after the atomic bombings of 1945. She held that souls answered in three successive waves, each holding the planet's shifting energy differently.

Worth knowing · 4 of 5

How did her books reach readers, given her subject?

After mainstream publishers turned her early manuscripts down, she started her own small press in 1992 to put them out herself. It grew into a publishing house for many other authors in the same field.

Worth knowing · 5 of 5

What do memory researchers say about material recovered this way?

Researchers who study memory warn that a leading question under hypnosis can build a detailed false memory as convincingly as it can recover a real one. She presented her sessions as genuine; hypnosis alone can't settle that.

Words to know

HypnotherapyUsing a state of focused relaxation to explore a client's thoughts, memories, or reported past lives.

QHHTHer named hypnosis method, short for Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique, taught to certified practitioners.

Past-life regressionA hypnosis session aimed at surfacing memories a client believes come from an earlier lifetime.

More words

ConfabulationThe mind filling memory gaps with invented detail that feels as real as an actual recollection.

A voice · 1 of 3

Dolores Cannon · Hypnotherapist who recorded the sessions

Across forty-six years of hypnosis sessions, she reported that clients consistently described past lives and, in her 2011 book, souls who arrived in three waves after 1945; she presented these accounts as genuine.

A voice · 2 of 3

Elizabeth Loftus · Psychologist who studies memory reliability

Through decades of experiments on how memory can be altered, she has shown that suggestive questioning, including under hypnosis, can implant detailed false memories that people experience as genuine and vividly recalled.

A voice · 3 of 3

Julia Cannon · Daughter who continued her work

Running the family's publishing house and training academy after her mother's death in 2014, she has continued teaching and certifying QHHT practitioners and keeping the recorded sessions and books available to new readers.

A line to leave them with

Forty-six years of sessions. Still her word against what memory can do.