The Night I Missed the Colosseum Tickets

What forgetting taught me about trance.

This blog post was written to be posted at the end of July, when I was in Florence, Italy, jus before taking the train to Rome.

After writing about how I missed the important Colosseum online ticket booking, in the midst of busy travel schedule and other emotional ups and downs, I somehow managed to forget that I had written this post. So I thought I didn’t have time to write a blog. Unusually for me, I skipped the July post completely.

Just like what you are about to read, let’s just blame human trances.

Since I would only have five days in Rome, and since Rome is such a city rich in history and culture, I decided to make a more specific daily itinerary. And because Rome is such a high-demand destination, every guidebook I read urged me to reserve time slots online for certain attractions to ensure my entrance on the day I planned to visit.

The Colosseum is one of those places.

Just as the Eiffel Tour is synonymous with Paris, look at almost any travel agency or airline company that flies to Rome and the iconic representation of the destination is the Colosseum. Today, general admission to the Colosseum is almost entirely based on timed-entry tickets. Official tickets are released in rolling batches about 30 days ahead, with additional inventory sometimes appearing closer to the date. Popular morning slots often sell out quickly.

Like many people, my self-planned itinerary on August 17 was to arrive at the Colosseum relatively earlier, around 9 a.m., so I could still have the rest of my day to visit the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill without rushing.

That meant the tickets I wanted to obtain were released on July 17, Roman Time. I had heard that tickets could disappear within hours, or maybe even minutes.

No problem. I had my browser open for days. I refreshed it many times to make sure everything was working, I put the ticket release on my calendar: at 11:45 p.m. Pacific Time on July 17. Nothing could go wrong, right?

And I didn’t have to stay up just for it. These days, I go to bed at around 1 a.m. if I consider it an early night.

But then, I forgot.

I got up late on July 18. I made breakfast and enjoyed it on my beautiful balcony, with a view of the North shore Mountains and Stanley Park. It wasn’t until closer to noon that a thought suddenly returned to my mind.

Already too late. The earliest ticket I could reverse was at 10:45am.

Don’t tell me that meant I could simply have an unrushed morning and take it slow. Knowing how much Rome has to offer – and how hot midday touring can be – it made an earlier start in August in Rome that much more desirable. I couldn’t help but got very disappointed at myself.

And a little disbelief. After all those preparations.

Some words @#%$#$ later, I became curiously about how I could possibly have forgotten. Professionally, I knew exactly why it happened. And because of that, I couldn’t really beat myself up too much. I knew better.

I did know tickets were released daily.
I did leave the browser tab open.
I did set a calendar reminder.
I then did eventually remember the following morning.
And regardless, I still obtained tickets.

I wasn’t scrolling instagram until 2 a.m. This wasn’t me failing to plan. It was that my attention had been hijacked by something emotionally significant.

On the night when August 17 tickets were released, intrusive thoughts had returned to my mind. For the past three months, this had been happening frequently in the evening, especially when I took a shower.

Three months earlier, I had discovered something deeply disturbing in my long-term relationship, something involving betrayal. Since then, I had been emotionally all over the place.

At the precise moment when I could finally obtain the Colosseum tickets, I was once again wrestling with one of the deepest injuries I’ve experienced in my adult life.

One of the strange things about studying hypnosis professionally is discovering that understanding a process doesn’t exempt you from it. A cardiologist can still have a heart attack. A psychologist can still experience depression. Likewise, someone who studies attention for a living can still have their own attention completely captured by grief. Knowledge gives us recognition, not immunity.

During that night’s shower, my mind once again entered a highly salient loop around certain unacceptable behaviours of my partner. That loop became the dominant attractor. The Colosseum tickets, important though they were, simply lost the competition for my attention for a few hours.

That was a hypnotic trance I entered.

Hypnosis isn’t primarily about someone else controlling your mind. At its core, it is about attention becoming organized around one dominant reality while countless other realities fade into the background.

We often talk about entering a trance, as though trance were a single state that we either are or aren’t in. But in everyday life, several possible trances can be competing for our attention all the time.

That evening, one of them was the trance of planning my trip to Rome. Another was the emotional trance created by what I had discovered in my relationship. The latter won—not because it was objectively more important, but because emotionally it carried far greater salience in that moment.

My intention to buy Colosseum tickets hadn’t disappeared. My memory hadn’t been erased. Rather, another reality had become more emotionally compelling. My mind kept returning to the same questions, the same images, the same unfinished emotional business. Compared with that, a browser tab sitting quietly on my computer simply couldn’t compete.

That’s exactly how attention works. Wherever attention is drawn, our mental energy flows, and a particular state begins to form. What is obvious or important in one state may be inaccessible in another. We often assume our priorities determine where our attention goes. More often, the reverse is true. Whatever captures our attention begins to define what feels important. Attention doesn’t merely illuminate experience; it edits it. It determines which parts of reality become psychologically prominent and which quietly disappear beyond the edge of awareness.

That evening, I simply “dropped” from my awareness the very thing I had considered important for many weeks.

One interesting thing about trance is that it doesn’t announce itself. While we’re inside it, we rarely think, I’m in a trance. We simply believe we’re thinking about something important. From the inside, it feels like reality itself. Only later, after we’ve emerged, do we notice how narrowly our awareness had become.

Very disappointed as I was, knowing what I know, I couldn’t spend too much time blaming myself.

We tend to judge ourselves harshly for what we forget. We assume forgetting means we didn’t care enough or weren’t disciplined enough. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes forgetting is evidence that another part of our life was demanding nearly all of our mental resources. Before rushing to self-condemnation, it may be worth asking a different question:

What had captured my mind so completely that everything else temporarily disappeared?

Do I, then, blame my partner who betrayed me?

Not for missing the earlier tickets.

Yes he – or the memory of what he did – stole my attention for one more evening. But I also had choices that evening. My mind had entered a loop, but I wasn’t condemned to remain in it forever.

That morning, when I interrupted my partner while he was vacuuming the floor and dramatically expressed my disappointment about my forgetfulness, he simply said, “It will work out. We’ll still have a great time there.”

That’s true. The intrusive thoughts did not steal my excitement about standing inside the Colosseum. My attention was completely occupied by those immense stones, the scale of the place, the history, the heat, the voices echoing through the arches.

Not because Rome could erase any pain. But because, for those seventy-five minutes, something else was allowed to occupy my mind.

Perhaps that is one quiet definition of healing.

The Colosseum, Rome — August 17, 2026

Healing isn’t necessarily the permanent disappearance of painful thoughts. It is the gradual return of freedom over what is allowed to occupy our attention.
I don’t know exactly when memories of betrayal will stop winning every competition for my awareness. But I do know that they don’t have to win every time. Not because what happened has become unimportant, and not because I have forgotten, but because life can once again become larger than the wound.

And then I stood inside the Colosseum, at my time slot. Ancient stone did not erase the intrusive thoughts. History did not erase the rumination. Curiosity did not erase the repetition. The Colosseum didn’t change me.

But for those seventy-five minutes, my attention belonged somewhere else. Something else was allowed to occupy my mind.
Whatever occupies our minds becomes our experience in that moment, even though whatever isn’t occupying our minds doesn’t necessarily disappear. During those seventy-five minutes in the Colosseum, the loudest thing in my consciousness was the sound of my own footsteps on ancient Roman stone.

We don’t always choose our thoughts. But over time, we can become freer to choose which thoughts are allowed to keep winning.

And, apparently, this lesson applies to blog posts too. I had written this post, and intended to publish it in July. Then I forgot about it.

Perhaps nothing mysterious happened. One trance simply won the competition for my attention that evening. And then, a few months later, I found myself inside another one. Of all the trances competing for my attention, the one that mattered was the one I chose: standing beneath the arches of the Colosseum.