Christopher Harris - The Hypnotist and The Magician: A Guide To Street Hypnosis and Mentalism

The New Hypnotist
My very first books on Stage Hypnosis were all about pseudo-hypnotic trickery.I owned book after book that was designed to teach someone how to do an entirehypnosis stage show using no real hypnosis at all. I became a skeptic. I coulddo the Dr Q. Hypnosis Show to the letter but was hypnosis really real? Wasevery hypnotist using only stage-whispers and crowd psychology paired withbiomechanical tricks that looked and felt like hypnosis? I had triedself-hypnosis and anything else that I could find so that I might experience itmyself but nothing worked. I couldnt seem to be hypnotized. And this onlyconfirmed my fears that hypnosis was just imaginative-role-enactment. Justpretend. And anytime I saw an article describing what I was going through theauthor gave some statistic of the population that was supposedlyun-hypnotizable. This percentage of the population totaled 40%-60% of thepopulation and this was why we had to go through elimination tests at thebeginning of each show. We needed to weed out these un-hypnotizableintroverts from the extroverted attention-whores that were just looking for anyexcuse to ditch their inhibitions and act like fools for their friends. Butdeep down inside, some part of me knew. Some part of me always felt that therewere some hypnotists that had a secret of some sort that let them do realhypnosis. These people are just closely guarding their secrets I thought. Butwhat I was doing was working good enough, I had people think they werehypnotized all the time.
As time went on I found myself living in North Hollywood, CA. I had left thecasinos of Las Vegas and worked for movie and television producers as an animaltrainer from time to time. But it wasnt very stable work. Sometimes I wouldhave a gig in Las Vegas or in Los Angeles and I would make pretty good money -Other times I would go quite some time without a good paying gig and that washard because I had a son to support. I worked as a magician part-time and didany other odd job I could get but when my girlfriend told me she was pregnantwith my second child I knew I had to do something. Luckily for me fate had aplan.
My girlfriend had taken the first month of classes at a school nearby in LosAngeles called The Hypnosis Motivation Institute a few years before she had metme, and supposedly they were the real deal. She had forgotten pretty mucheverything except for an arm-raising suggestibility test that they had taughtbut one night after she had told me for the thousandth time that I should lookinto the school she convinced me to let her try the arm-raising suggestibilitytest on meand it worked! It wasnt a huge demonstration of hypnosis by anymeans but it was the most any real hypnosis technique had ever worked on me.One of my arms actually lifted up in the air a little bit all by itself. Butwith my second child on the way there was just no way I was going to be able togo back to school for the year that it would take to graduate. This schoolwasnt one of those weekend courses you took online and just printed out yourcertificate three hours after you signed up. This was a full year, with aclinical internship and residency working hands-on with people in an actualclinic. This was a real accredited institution; in fact it was the only realcollege of hypnotherapy in the country. Not only that, this was the longest,most intensive, most expensive hypnosis school in the world! I would be crazyto begin college classes at a school like that when I could barely scrape uprent money doing magic and animal training for a living.
But then one day my girlfriend (who was beginning to look very pregnant now)had been going through a few of her old boxes and as I was in the living roompalming and fanning a pack of Bicycles she came out and tossed me a book. Itwas her old textbook from the hypnosis college. The book was written by apsychologist named Dr John Kappas, and what he said in this book was differentfrom anything I had ever read in the Dr Q. pseudo-hypnosis books. This doctorsaid that hypnosis was real, and not only that, he maintained thateverybody in the world could be hypnotized! He said that hypnosis was anaturally occurring human experience, and that we entered into hypnosismultiple times every single day and we just didnt know that we were doing it.He said that the old belief that only 40%-60% of the population could behypnotized was a myth and that it only persisted because hypnotists were takinga one-size-fits-all approach that didnt work with every person Butsupposedly he had discovered something he called the E&P Theory of Suggestibilitythat let a hypnotist work with anybody, even those highly analyticalintroverted individuals that we never let on stage.
I read this book from cover-to-cover and used my pregnant girlfriend as aguinea pig to see how well it worked. I had heard of hypnobirthing and thoughtI would give it a try - But I wasnt prepared for how well this worked; in factI was literally shocked at how successful the techniques this doctor createdwere. And I wasnt the only one. The nurses, obstetrician, even the anesthesiologistcouldnt believe what they were seeing. The pregnancy had become verycomplicated toward the end (due to a condition called Pre-Eclampsia) and herblood pressure rose to such a point that her organs began shutting down. Butshe seemed perfectly comfortable. In fact, I have pictures of the contractionmonitoring equipment showing contractions so large they were off the charts andyet she was still saying no to pain medication because she was feeling no pain.Even when the doctors had to perform an emergency C-section to save her and thebaby she was perfectly fine.