Hello all!
I've been looking to branch into hypnotism for a while because it's a subject that interests me. I've had very little exposure to performance hypnotism (a handful of youtube videos and nothing else), and most of my experience and reading on the subject regards self-hypnotism, meditation, and hypnotism as a scientific phenomenon under research conditions. I have what I consider a layman's understanding of the subject; I have no training or experience with hypnotizing other people, I consider my reading on the subject to be superficial at best, and I haven't really had any compelling or successful experiences with self hypnosis any of the times that I've tried to produce a demonstrable effect with it (like hypnotic paralysis, for example).
Nevertheless, I've been wanting to explore it as a possible direction for my character, and I have some personal theories about what hypnotism is and how and why it works the way it does in performance settings. As a kind of pre-test, I decided to attempt to develop my own routine prior to consulting any teaching materials regarding performance hypnotism. I wanted to see if I my own ideas had anything to them before I started adding in other stuff. As a point of comparison I did aim to achieve some of the same kinds of results I'd seen other performers get, but I wanted to see if I could do it using patter and techniques that were as original as possible. I had a couple of goals with this routine:
- Keep the whole thing in a safe, positive headspace for everyone involved
- Cause someone to have a semi-involuntary emotional response to something that isn't really in the room
- Cause someone to temporarily forget an obvious bit of information
I'd been conceiving the patter and steps I wanted to use in the routine for a while now, and last night I got to test it out to a surprising degree of success. I wanted to choose the right place, time, and person to try it with because I believe that's part of the process with making this kind of hypnosis work, and last night at my wife's birthday party I was jazzing my magic and had the opportunity to work with someone that I thought would be great for the effect.
The idea for the routine started with a simple image: a purple duck. I had seen another hypnotist make someone laugh involuntarily somehow until commanded to stop (either I don't remember how exactly or the video didn't show the full lead-in), and I wanted to see if I could get the same thing to happen without reading a method for doing it first. I figured I could probably do it by getting someone in a relaxed state, getting them to follow a few simple mental directions to activate the imagination, and then getting the imagination to insist upon a purple duck sitting somewhere in the room.
I openly work within the imagination when I patter this routine because I believe people are very open to the suggestion of imagining something as opposed to seeing or believing it. I honestly think that's part of the reason this worked as well as it did the first time out. Once I had her picturing the duck, I made the suggestion to trigger the laughter, and she started laughing uncontrollably and suddenly stopped when I suggested that the duck was gone, along with the impulse to laugh. I don't think it could have gone more perfectly.
From there I moved into the "stolen thought" portion of the routine. I had seen someone do it with the person's own name before, and I wanted to give that a try because it seemed like an interesting challenge for someone just starting out. This was the one portion of the routine that I borrowed from one that I saw online because it seemed like a more difficult task, so I wanted to be using a method that I was sure could work. The uncertainty lay in the fact that I didn't know if my own methods and lead-in would have someone with me enough to even pretend to forget a thought, especially something as personal as her own name. I was hoping that if the laughing thing worked on both the start, crescendo, and stop, the name thing might work too. It turns out, at least on the first time around, I was right. I had her say her name a few times, point to where it is in her head, then I "pulled it out" of that spot, "hid" it from her in my hand, and asked what her name was. She couldn't say it. I pattered through that for a few seconds, then opened my hand, "showed" her the name, and asked again. She spat it right out with no hesitation. This part actually spooked me a little bit. I was not expecting this part of the routine to succeed on the first try, even with a well-selected volunteer.
After that I moved into my cold-reading routine, but I want to focus on the hypnosis bits because that's what I have questions about right now.
First off, what do you guys think of the routine and the ideas behind it? I didn't want to go into too much detail about my exact patter and execution because the post would have been even longer and I didn't want to expose too much of it, but what do you think about what's described here? I realize it's probably basic compared to the scope of performance hypnotism, and I'm interested in the opinion of people who are better at this than I am.
Second, I'd like to know more about the origins of the two effects produced with this routine (involuntary laughter and forgetting a thought) , especially the execution of the name steal. It's performed exactly like it sounds: I pantomime grabbing the name from the person's head and hiding it while giving a verbal suggestion to match, and the name leaves the person's brain. I saw it somewhere in a performance online, and now I'm having trouble finding/remembering it. If anyone can tell me where they think that came from I'd really appreciate it. I'd like to know both for my own curiosity and for credit reasons if it ever comes up in conversation with other performers, and on the off-chance that it's original enough to someone that I'd need to take steps to gain permission to be doing it for people.