I was hypnotized once. My high school had a tradition of hiring a hypnotist for the afterprom party at the school. I remember everything up through sitting on a chair in the library and hearing the hypnotist say something to the effect of, You are standing at the top of 10 stairs and you step down one step. You’re at the top of nine stairs… and then it was like I blinked and it was 20 minutes later and everyone was laughing. I heard a lot of stories about what we all did but I don’t remember any of it. (I will admit, I don’t need hypnotism to strut like a chicken or pretend to give birth in front of people.)
I dunno. I saw a guy do a stage show when I was at college, and one of the participants was told he was an army sergeant. He was ‘primed’ to march in a straight line when marching music was played over the PA. Towards the end of the show they played the music and he started marching, right over the edge of the stage and onto his face. The lights came on and he was led away, bloodied, to get medical treatment.
It could of course have all been part of the show, but a few months later I met one of the other guys who’d been on the stage that evening, who was a genuine student. He told me he ‘was conscious of what [he] was doing the whole time, but whatever the hypnotist told [him] to do seemed just natural and the right thing to do’. Which sounds like he was undergoing some form of heightened suggestibility, albeit not some kind of B-movie unconscious ‘trance’.
This is what is generally described as the limit of hypnosis to affect behavior.
It’s also why people buy iPhones, so the phenomena is not that unusual.
That’s one of the most horrible things I can imagine witnessing at a stage show. My only hope is that it was rehearsed, he fell onto a mattress, and the “blood” was ragu.
Interesting thread - a program by Derren Brown recently dealt with hypnosis and the limits of what it can do. Something that was dealt with up front was that different people are more or less suggestible than others, so he had to go through a process to weed out the non-suggestible people. He then kept going through exercises to remove people until he had the most suggestible pair. They were presented with an ice bath, one so cold it would hurt your hand to put it in, and then under hypnotic command put their hands in and said they couldn’t feel the cold.
One of them even got in the bath for something like 15 minutes where his heart rate slowed close, and they stopped before it got too low or it could trigger a heart attack. They used a thermo-imager to show the part of his body that was submerged, and the rest of it, and there was a huge discrepancy in heat. It wasn’t until he broke the suggestive state that the guy felt cold at all, but at that point he was being whisked away to a hot tub to warm up again. Either the whole thing was a big lie (not an ice bath, thermo-imager was faked, the other people who tested the ice bath were lying) or it’s possible to do some fucking strange things with the right people under hypnosis.
Also, this was the point in the show BEFORE the guy had been trained to shoot someone and not remember it under hypnotic command 
To put a finer point on it, there is no element to hypnosis that is not submission. All hypnosis is, in reality, auto-hypnosis. You give permission for the hypnotist to tell you a story, but you make it real. It’s plausible deniability that you use on yourself.
And yeah, I’ve been hypnotized a few times. One time specifically my goal was to observe my internal mental processes. The real fun was riding the edge between submission and awareness. I let my body be limp and immobile a instructed… mostly. I managed to cross my feet, and that took herculean effort, but that was because I was accepting the trip as a whole. It was quite fun, and quite instructive about how my mind works.
That was precisely my experience. I organized a hypnotist as part of an event for my staff. It seemed right that I put myself (as boss) in a position (along side others)to be a point of mockery.
Fourteen of us went on stage and sat on chairs. I listened intently to what the hypnotist was saying and consciously gave myself permission to succumb. The hypnotist quietly sent those who didn’t “go under” back to their chairs in the audience. When I looked up there was only one other on stage with me.
We went through a series of hilarious suggestions and I was aware that while it wasn’t real, the emotions that accompanied the various situations were real. (A large bird soared toward us on cue and we cowered in fear - that felt very real). Some of it felt a bit like acting (as in I was aware of what we were doing at all times) but there was no sense of not wanting to do whatever was suggested, and absolutely no embarrassment.
One interesting side note. I have MS and with it some balance issues. The hypnotist had us standing on one leg or moving then freeze motion. My balance at that time was perfect. I couldn’t replicate that in my usual state. I don’t know what that means exactly.
Interestingly it created a deep bond between the other hypnotee and me. We were in some altered state, but it was a shared other world. We can still just look at one another and feel some intimate understanding.
I don’t know much about hypnotism at all, and have not experienced it or seen it first hand… Do they still do the “venues full of people that want to quit smoking” type of self-hypnotism? About 20 years ago my mother, mother-in-law, and father-in-law went to one of these… My mother and father-in-law both had no desire to smoke afterwards but my mother-in-law wanted to light up in the car on the way home. My mother did say that she could tell by my mother-in-law’s fidgeting (or whatever) that it wasn’t going to work, but at the time my mother wasn’t distracted by the activity beside her.
This guy had a guarantee where if you needed to come back it was free, and my mother-in-law went when he came back to town within the next few months. I noted that wasn’t it “convenient” that he came back to town… :0) Anyway, this time she quit. None of them has ever smoked again.
I was hypnotized many times by this guy - Shawn Masters. If you read the article from The Crimson you will see that he was a famed stage hypnotist. The second user comment by Alan explains how I got to be regularly hypnotized for weeks.
The family of a guy I worked with befriended Shawn and he visited them in Canberra. My workmate invited a bunch of guys, all late teens and early twenties, around to meet him for lunch one weekend. After lunch Shawn began hypnotizing people and explaining how hypnotism works. He demonstrated a few of his stage suggestions and gave people post hypnotic suggestions for their general well being.
That was the start of a weekend routine that went on for months. More and more people turned up, the whole process was fascinating, and each weekend the house was full of people. I think everyone ended up getting hypnotized eventually, most of us many times.
Originally I was scared to be hypnotized and waited a couple of weeks before volunteering. The first time Shawn hypnotized someone he did it with them standing in front of him. They would fall into his arms, he would lay them on the carpet and when he “woke” them he would ask if they were hypnotized. Many people said, “No.” He would then ask why they were laying on the floor and they would make up stories, “I suddenly got really tired.” Or, “I just went along so you wouldn’t look stupid.”
So when it was my turn I felt the same. I didn’t feel like I was hypnotized, however that was meant to feel. I was sure that I could have opened my eyes if I wanted to. Although when he told me to try, and suggested that the harder I tried the more tightly closed they were, I couldn’t and so stopped trying. But I had collapsed into his arms and I was on the floor and I had laughed at other people’s rationalizations, so I said guess I was hypnotized.
And most of the time it was like that. I was conscious of what was being said and what was going on and sometimes thought I’m not going to do that - stripping for example. But later on when the magic word was spoken I’ would begin without thinking. One of his tests for whether people were really induced was suggesting that your extended arm was as stiff and strong as a steel bar. He would then lean his considerable weight on it and even slight people wouldn’t budge. When he tried it on me I was thinking, “This will be embarrassing for him,” assuming that it wouldn’t work but it did.
Eventually the weekends turned into a kind of course in pop psychology and hypnosis and self hypnosis. Shawn used his stage tricks to make points but was hypnotizing a whole roomful of people and giving them suggestions to quit smoking or to able to instantly calm themselves by clicking their fingers. I don’t recall that we paid anything for all this but months later Shawn was conducting large paid courses for audiences of 100 or so.
The bunch of guys from work who had been in the first accidental course went along to show our support. We were sitting at the back of the hall and Shawn began to do the Tarzan gag mentioned in the article. He said to the guy onstage all the usual stuff, “I am about to wake you up…blah blah…and when I say the word jungle…” at which point I leaped to my feet and began beating my chest making a Tarzan call. Shawn laughed, got me to sit down, put me under and removed the suggestion.
What was really spooky was that we were quietly talking up the back not really paying attention at all and I was on my feet without any idea what was happening. We worked out later that I had received the suggestion months before on the one day I had left early. It was Shawn’s practice to hypnotize everyone en mass at the end of each day and remove all the stage suggestions and I had missed out but had no idea that it would remain effective or even that it was there.
Anyway. I hope despite the length of this post, it is of some help.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen:
http://members.fortunecity.com/helga_reich/ShawnMastersPage.html
Yes, I was so desperate to find my lost wedding ring that I went to a hypnotist. I made my husband come along to “protect” me but I’m pretty sure he fell asleep. I felt a little out of it but the session wasn’t successful at figuring out what happened to the ring.
I think there was an odd side effect of the relaxation part of it however. I was horribly self-conscious and would giggle inappropriately when at my mother’s house but really wasn’t aware I was doing it – until after the session we went over there and that behavior was gone. I know, weird.
I had a teacher in high school who would take one day a year and hypnotize anyone in his classes who agreed to it. His story was that he learned this in the Army as a medic.
As I understand from the little research I’ve read, the more intelligent the subject, the harder it is to hypnotize them. That squares with what I’ve seen.
I remember his patter and the session very well. There were about 5 of us “going under” in my class. He began by having place our hands on our desk. Then, we were to look carefully at the hairs on our hand. Now look at the base of the hair. See the little hole where the hair is coming from? Now concentrate on that, and imagine it opening up. Imagine putting a small straw in the hole. Now, we’re putting helium into the straw, and it will make your hand rise up and float.
I’m condensing a bit - it took 4-5 minutes, but his voice was calm and relaxing, and I could actually “see” the small hole opening, and as my hand began to float - I wasn’t “going along” with it - I thought to myself “wow, this really works” and immediately my hand fell. I was able to step outside my thoughts and be an observer, and that ruined it immediately.
I woke up, but the others didn’t. He would never make us do anything dangerous or really foolish, but what I saw was amazing. To Johnny - a big football player - he suggested that Johnny would not be able to move anything as long as the teacher was pointing at it. Chair, desk, dollar bill on the desk- whatever. He would point to a chair, and ask Johnny to move it over there, and drop his hand. John would move the chair.
He did it again, only continuing to point at the chair. Johnny couldn’t move the chair to save his life. I saw the strain and effort he made, but the chair wouldn’t budge.
I watched him struggle valiantly to lift a dollar bill off the desk, but if the teacher was pointing at it, it was impossible.
He had a couple of girls acting like rabbits and chickens, and fun things like that, but the most amazing thing was the power he had over Johnny and a couple of other guys.
I love Penn & Teller, and I believe the stage acts are bullshit, but I know what I’ve experienced and seen, and can tell you without equivocation - the mind is a mystery, and a very powerful tool we haven’t begun to fathom.
I very nearly died in a bad motorcycle accident years ago. I don’t remember a thing.
Witnesses told me what happened- a car came into my lane on a curve - but I got nothing! My wife always wanted me to undergo hypnosis to see if I could remember details about the car - it was a hit and run- but I’ve always been afraid to. I’m sure it would work, and then I’ve got a full-color memory of getting run over and mashed by a car rolling around in my head to jump out at me every now and then.
Who needs that?