Absolutely buzzing!

Well I've just gotten back from Oxford and I'm absolutely buzzing, so I thought I'd write a quick entry about the present before I revert to my back story in my next installment.

I've been a feeling a bit subdued in my confidence as a hypnotist recently, so it was absolutely amazing to get the chance to work with someone who is probably one of the best subjects I've had to date, to put it mildly. This person also had a genuine interest in giving it a try, and it's always wonderful to meet people with that kind of enthusiasm.

I met up with this person and a group of other people we know in one of the many nice pubs in Oxford. One of the ones that's tucked away and you'd end up walking past for years completely oblivious if you didn't know it was there. It was good to sit out the back of this particular tavern with this great bunch of people toasting marshmallows on a brazier. I'm starting to really love Oxford!

Of course, what was even better though was that my friend said she was willing to give a little hypnosis a try that evening. This we like to hear!

I was quite confident that she'd respond well thanks to an insight offered by Anthony Jacquin. He says that people who have a history of sleepwalking are always brilliant hypnotic subjects. This girl has a history of sleep talking and sleep fighting (apparently her boyfriend has the bruises to prove it!) , so I was confident of success. Hats off to Ant, he was so right about this I was amazed.

Because I felt confident I brought out my newest trick; a hand drop rapid induction. This is where the subject is asked to press their hand down on top of the hypnotist's hand, which the hypnotist suddenly drops without warning, at the same time telling the subject to "sleep". My friend went out like a light. I deepened, fractionated, gave the sleep suggestion and knew immediately from her response that I was in the presence of a master; someone truly talented hypnotically.

I went through my usual canon of catalepsy tricks, which I'll detail in later posts because I've done these before, but the real highlight of the evening was achieving a couple of new effects I've not managed before. The first of these occurred on the spur of the moment when a choir of singers came into the beer garden and started serenading us all. My friend wasn't too keen on them, so I zapped her back into trance suggested that she'd not be able to hear them. This produced a really weird effect because upon waking her sure enough she couldn't hear the singers, but for some reason the sound of their singing had been replaced with that of someone playing on a mouth organ; that was what she could hear. It's interesting because the group had been using one to get the right note before they started singing.

The latter of the two new things I tried was a little bit more usual. I suggested to my friend that she'd be convinced she hadn't really been hypnotised and that she'd been playing along all the time. The conversation went along these lines:

"Sorry Parkey, I've just been playing along."
"Oh really? Why can't you move your arm?"
"I don't want to move it, I'm playing along."
"No, really move it."
"I don't want to!"
"I think you've been hypnotised."
"No I haven't!"
"Sleep"

...and that settled that one. This routine went down quite well. Of course there were a couple of people present who couldn't decide whether it was a wind-up or not, but they soon went quiet when I offered to let them try. They always tend to, hehe.

Anyway, that was my brilliant evening.