Mass Hallucination and the Dream of Waking Life
How collective forms of self-hypnosis are normalized
A man walks up to a young woman on a beach and asks if she’d like to be hypnotized for fun. She gives her consent, so he puts his hand on her shoulder and asks her to focus on his other palm as he goes into a rhythmic verbal patter, a series of instructions to calm her until she’s so relaxed that her head dips down and he supports her weight to keep her standing.
While she’s in that state of deep relaxation, he inputs a command, telling her that when he snaps his fingers, she’ll forget her name. On his command she exits the relaxed state, the two chat a bit, and he suddenly asks her her name. She’s stunned and embarrassed to admit that she’s forgotten.
Back and forth the pair go as the young hypnotist snaps his fingers, relaxing and commanding her to perform stranger and stranger acts, and she carries them out like clockwork, making a fool of herself in front of dozens of bemused onlookers. For example, he tells her that he’ll be invisible when she awakens. And when he snaps his fingers, she acts as though he’d vanished. He picks up a water bottle and she collapses and declares that it’s floating in midair.
This summarizes what you can see for yourself in many videos on a young hypnotist’s YouTube…