Back in my youth, I frequently enjoyed reading books about hypnosis and varying interpretations and on it. One of the first books that I was proud to finish was “The February Man” by Milton Erickson and Ernest Rossi. Compared to that book, which was a case study in unconventional approaches (primarily time distortion) applied to hypnotherapy, this book is remarkably standard. Nevertheless, self-hypnosis can be used as a template for guided meditation, and this book goes into sufficient detail
Also, if you’re paranoid and are afraid as a consequence that putting yourself into hypnosis might lead to being trapped in hypnosis forever, take heart, you might just fall asleep! However, if you’re still afraid, the book takes time to give you multiple options for getting yourself out of your trance. Personally the significant amount of time spent addressing rumors and silly fears about hypnosis is campy and takes time away from the practical concepts, but is still amusing.
One thing I’ve noticed is that in the many decades since hypnosis was first discovered, the standard literature on it hasn’t changed much. I initially thought this was because it’s conversational nature makes it difficult to standardize and separate into control and experimental groups. However, with the rise of NLP, which takes self-hypnotic ideas and mixes them with specific rituals and visualizations, and having read from a book “Hypnotic Poetry: A Study of Trance-inducing Technique in Certain Poems and Its Literary Significance”, I’m now convinced that it would be easy to study provided one is willing branch out into other methods, such as applying hypnotic principles to a script or poem and taking peoples’ physiological data as the poem is read. There is no excuse for this to be pseudoscience anymore.
If you’ve read anything else on the subject, then I would not recommend this book very highly. In it’s place, I would recommend “Introducing NLP” or any of the books by Milton Erickson and Ernest Rossi.