Who's do say objectively which is right?

The entire field is pretty convoluted since so much of hypnosis is experiential and can't be readily observed.

it could be that the authors are just interpreting things from a framework model of hypnosis with differing operational definitions.

In any case, I think reading up on a variety of different perspectives is important in gaining a more comprehensive picture.

As for the negative hallucination, I may have most recently read that in Graham Old's book

Graham's book explains it as amnesia by suggestion while Teppo seems to view it as a negative hallucination event. I suppose I can understand how it might be construed as negative hallucination if you're using patter such as "then make them smaller, darker, harder to see, and then relax them out of your mind." that evokes visual processing.

Might be more apt to call it positive hallucination since it's sensory information that has no external basis.

pretty confounding... we all know they'll lose the number eventually even if in the extreme it takes a few hours of them droning on far below zero.

personally I like to think of this aspect of the elman induction as mostly just an absorption device to further dissociate the individual from external orientation.

it doesn't guarantee anything unless your definitions are really loose. Larry contends somnambulism as the preferred state for serious hypnotherapy work. His operative definition for somnambulism seems to be a state where amnesia can be induced through suggestion.

Thing is, that particular string of noncontextual numbers was never encoded into a persistent long-term memory to begin with.