Fun in Camden

I decided that this month I would like to turn up to on of the MMH meets in London, so yesterday I booked the afternoon off work and headed down to Covent Garden in London.

The MMH regulars are a great bunch of people who are at least as adept at impromptu magic tricks as they are at hypnosis, and they often have me completely in awe when they make cards, coins and rubber bands in their hands do all sorts of crazy things.

I am currently working very hard on making a coin vanish. Ben endorsed my efforts by saying that it "works well... on 12 year olds maybe".

For the most part this was for me a Social meetup, at least for the first half. We all sat in the pub and chatted for most of the rest of the afternoon, and then went for dinner.

After much procrastination we decided that we should all head off to Camden, or rather some of us. We made our way to a very nice studenty bar in Camden where we caught up with Darren.

It was at this point that Pete Crossland asked if he could hypnotise me, a consequence of my gaining a reputation as an easy subject I suspect. He used a hand-to-eye fixation induction and tried a few tricks like sticking me to my stool, which of course worked, and then told me that Darren was invisible so I couldn't see him, which worked only in so far as that I couldn't look at Darren directly, but of course I knew he was still there and could see him in my peripheral vision.

Pete's routine certainly turned a few heads nearby. I came out of trance to find several bystanders staring at me intently as though they expected me to explode or something similar at any minute. It was the foot in the door that all impromptu hypnotists like to get, so soon two girls were being shown hypnosis.

Pete handed me over to Darren, who did a routine with me that felt rather groundbreaking in terms of my experiences as a subject. He told me that I would not be able to answer any question regardless how easy or trivial it was. In the past I have found my reaction to such suggestions to consist of hearing the answer loud and clear inside my head, but I simply cannot bring myself to say the answer out loud.

This experience was very different. I found myself completely unable to think about the question at all. Each question simply threw my mind into confusion as it scrambled around in the dark trying to find the meaning of it and follow it through. It was a very new experience for me and I was genuinely speechless!

It just goes to show how quickly response to a certain type of phenomena can actually develop once the brain actually discovers how to do it! When it comes to amnesia that is something that is genuinely quite exciting, if a little scary. Rollercoaster scary.

Once again I found myself heading off just as things were starting to kick off properly with the local students. Great to see everyone again though!