Let me also say that I hate prefixing anything with "hypno", but I can't think of a better name for it at the moment.
On arriving at the pub I was quite surprised to find that the place was completely heaving, although in hindsight that was what one should expect from a pub in the west end just before the theatres opened. To start with there were four of us from the original meet in November, but as our numbers grew we were forced to go in search of an alternative pub.
Our numbers were growing because Darren seemed to be some kind of unwitting magnet for every hypnotist in London. In the first pub a couple of people approached and turned out to be friends of a friend of Darren's. Then several people he'd met on a recent hypnosis course turned up. If any more had turned up we would probably have had to start building our own pub!
As it was we found a nice small pub nearby and, most of us standing up, took over one end of the bar area. This was good because for most of the evening it found us wandering around amongst ourselves and we weren't stuck chatting to just the same couple of people for the whole evening. Once again I was amazed how nice everybody was.
Anyway, John, one of the guys who'd been on the recent course with Darren pulled up a pair of bar stools and volunteered to sit in it whilst Darren hypnotised him. Darren later commented that this gave us a sort of stage, and I would agree completely if it hadn't been for the through traffic en route to the toilets. The craziest thing was that whilst I felt that we were being very conspicuous, just like the last time we'd met up and done hypnosis in a pub, somehow most of the people in the there didn't pay us any attention at all!
Darren proceeded to demonstrate various inductions on John including what seems to be his favourite, the Cerbone Butterfly induction. Most of them are very fast and direct, although Darren also seems to have developed a liking for the Rehearsal Induction, one of my own favourites.
I don't know why but John goes under the alias of "Moses" (I have a theory, but we weren't near enough to the Red Sea for me to test it)
At one point the barman caught my eye and pointing to John, who was bent double in hypnotic trance on his barstool, and mimed a drinking motion with his hand, obviously asking me whether John was the worst for drink. I shook my head, and after the barman had nodded and turned away I wondered to myself how I could have mimed "it's okay, he's just hypnotised". Perhaps a swinging watch motion...
Anyway, just as Darren finished with John I decided that I really needed to overcome that pre-hypnosis anxiety that I always get and jump straight in with both feet, so I stepped up and asked Darren if he minded if I borrowed his subject.
So I did my first Erickson handshake of the evening. Without explaining what I was going to do I took John's hand in a handshake and, pulling it out to support it under hand and elbow, proceeded to talk him down into an eyes-open trance. It worked very well, and I could see and feel it working as his eyes glazed over and in the way that his arm became stiffer and stiffer as time went on. When I finally removed my hand I tried to make a suggestion that he was frozen in place on his stool, but this didn't work quite so well; perhaps I should have deepened a bit more.
This didn't matter anyway because I suddenly was faced with a queue of people all wanting me to do the handshake on them and I ended up doing it about five times on five different people in the space of 30 minutes! It felt really good because I had something a little bit different to share.
I do really love the Erickson Handshake induction and I think a lot of that is because it's so different from anything else. The experience of being completely tranced with eyes still open seems to be quite a novel experience to those who tried it; again I find myself wishing that my response to hypnosis wasn't so awful so I could get a decent experience of it!
In fact, at my encouragement Ben tried this induction on me. He was doing very well and I could even feel myself starting to go cross eyed and loose focus. The trouble was that he'd started with a bit of an insane grin on his face and that seemed to send my thoughts off on a tangent. For some reason I found myself thinking of Just a minute on Radio 4, Ben talking about the Erickson Handshake for 60 seconds without deviation, hesitation or repetition and just at the point where Clement Freud buzzed in to challenge I lost my composure and laughed. I felt really bad about that afterward because Ben was actually doing very well and I know that it can be a bit disheartening when the subject seems to snap out of it, especially if they're laughing.
Ben also tried the Bandler handshake on me and went into a deepening routine based on imagery. It was good patter, but even after about what seemed like 5 minutes I really didn't feel anything was happening at all. I've recently started to develop an understanding of what going into trance feels like and I'm sad to say I just wasn't getting any of that detached feeling.
It was much the same later on when Darren demonstrated a confusion induction on me. I was genuinely confused and I dropped when Darren surprised me with "sleep!", the trouble was that I quickly realised what was happening and from that moment on absolutely nothing seemed to be happening. I was very much there in the present, didn't feel any of the sensations I've learned to associate with trance, and of course as always the phenomena that Darren tried didn't work.
Darren and Ben are both excellent hypnotists and I swear that if I wasn't so completely awful at being zapped I'd have been looking up at my own shoes!
The hypnosis was also mixed with some of us doing magic tricks. Most of these were card tricks, although it was an opportunity for me to show off the rubber bands trick, which I learned late last year (Thanks for that one Paul!)
I think the craziest moment of the evening for me came at the time I went to get my coat.
Darren was sat nearby and John had just finished working him into various tricks like number amnesia. Earlier earlier this month Darren showed me a video of him being hypnotised by John Cerbone himself on the "speed trance" course that he'd been on in Manchester. In this video Cerbone had performed an amazing one word induction based on expectancy and the idea that blinking is a natural pattern interrupt. I knew that Darren was quite "warm" in terms of hypnosis, so I knew that he would respond to such a trick if I tried it myself.
On a mad impulse I decided to do it. I marched straight up to him, looked him in the eye, and said "Darren, the next time you blink you'll drop straight into hypnosis!"
He gave me a surprised, dazed look and almost blinked.
I said something like "That's right you can try to resist it but it's going to happen!"
It was at this point he blinked, and I was a little bit slow with my "sleep!" but it didn't matter because he was already on the way down!
Off this I tried a couple of times to get him to hallucinate me speaking in an Irish accent, but all I got was a few funny looks from him. I was able to make him feel a bit less dazed about it all though as a kind of a farewell gift.
That little escapade was my parting shot though as I had to go and catch the train home. It turned out that Darren and the others had gone on elsewhere and had done a bit of impromptu stuff with strangers. Dammit! Hopefully I won't miss out on that next time.
As a bonus, here's the video Ben shot that evening:
Once again I had a really good time and learned a lot. Cheers guys!
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