6-25-02, Voice in the Crowd
Careful, You May Be
Hypnotized
By Pete Chaney
IPS Features
You’re riding along on a bus or in a car and looking
out of the window. But you are lost
in thought. You don’t even see
what you see as your mind is concentrating on some other thought.
You are oblivious to everything except the trail your thoughts lead you
down.
Careful. You
have just hypnotized yourself.
My generation had radio and comic books instead of
television with cartoons. Ventriloquism
and hypnotism were favorite themes in the stories. The shadow “clouded” men’s minds to make himself
invisible. A man could “throw his
voice” to make it come from another room.
I ordered a gadget from the think, tempting Johnson C. Smith catalogue to
make me a ventriloquist, a small cardboard like device that slipped under the
tongue. That didn’t work too
well. Neither did the spiraling
device I was supposed to mount on a pin and turn it until my subject was asleep.
Later as a young newspaper reporter, I became friends with a radio announcer who had studied hypnotism. He offered to hypnotism me and I went along, uncomfortably. Resting my arm on a table, I followed his instructions to concentrate on my hand and think of it rising into the air. My hand rose slowly through the procedure. Next he told me my eyes were becoming sleepy and I couldn’t hold my eyes open. While my eyes were closed, he told me that on the count of three I would open my eyes and write my name as I had written it in the first grade. With a sheepish grin, I looked at him and began to write. After all, I was awake and knew what was going on.
But the handwriting was precise and clear just as it had
once been, before years turned my signature into an illegible scrawl.
Hypnotism, or “nervous sleep,” probably goes back to
the first magician or sorcerer who found he could lead a person’s thoughts
into believing whatever the operator told the subject. A German physician named Franz Mesmer in the late 1700’s
was studying animal magnetism when he stumbled on his ability to put subjects
into a trance. He was credited with
miraculous cures of mind and body until the government shut him down because he
wouldn’t explain his “secret.” Maybe
he couldn’t.
The word hypnotism was coined in 1842 and was used by
doctors, particularly those treating mental problems. Freud was said to have tried and abandoned it because of the
difficulty in telling if the subject might be just saying things to please the
operator. In India, before the
advance of chloroform or ether, hypnotism was used even for the amputation of
limbs without pain.
The theory is that the conscious mind is put to sleep
and the hypnotist or operator controls the subconscious mind, which is said to
remember everything. My own
definition of the method is fascination, concentration, belief. The subject is given something to attract the attention—a
voice, a pendulum, the mental picture of floating peacefully on a cloud.
Concentration carries the thoughts down the path the operator opens until
the subject believes what he is told.
The common belief is that not everyone can be hypnotized
and no one will do anything under hypnotism he wouldn’t do normally.
I’ve always disagreed with both. Anyone
can hypnotize or be hypnotized. A
person in a deep trance will believe whatever the operator tells him.
Or, an unscrupulous person could tell a girl he craves that he is her
husband.
My younger cousins were my original victims.
I tried tests such as a post-hypnotic suggestion that he would see the
lemon on the table and believe it was an orange when I woke him up.
He munched the lemon and declared how sweet it was.
Another time I told my cousin I was carrying her back
ten years to when she was an eight-year-old child.
Asked to tell us what she was doing, she said I’m going to the movies.
What was on the marquee? I asked. Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs, she replied.
Realizing she was old enough to be in school, I asked
why she wasn’t.
“Today is Saturday,” she answered.
We checked back and that particularly date had fallen on
Saturday ten years previously.
Once in Germany I was hypnotizing a man and realized his
wife was under the spell also. I
had to carry them both along. During
his reign, Hitler had outlawed any practice of hypnotism. After all, he was the supreme hypnotist, putting a whole
nation under his spell.
Alfred Kallenbach was a friend whose father escaped the
Nazis and fled the Communists to reach West Germany and practice psychiatry.
He ceased using hypnotism when he found some of his patients had to call
him up and hear his voice for reassurance.
I stopped practicing hypnotism out of respect and fear
for the power it has. It’s a
great tool for the properly trained in medical use.
It’s not a toy. I have no
use for stage hypnotists. When an
operator carries a subject through a set of commands, he has to bring the same
subject back the same route. For
instance, suppose a hypnotist tells you that you are a chicken and forgets to
tell you that you are not a chicken before awakening you. Of course, you know you’re not a chicken, but that thought
is rumbling around in your subconscious.
If you are going to be hypnotized, make sure the
operator knows what he’s doing—and that you trust him.
Until then, just look out the window, relax and hypnotize yourself.
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