Hypnotrap?

“He's a hypnotist, hypnotist of ladies
Never had a pocket watch, never counted backwards
You won't remember why you liked him
You won't remember why you liked him.”
– They Might be Giants, “Hypnotist of Ladies”

     To the best of my knowledge I’ve been hypnotized three times. Two of these incidents are theoretical – but if the second one wasn’t hypnotism, I don’t know what it might have been. Brief, non-repeated mental illness? A transient ischemic attack? Chicken strips laced with some very short-acting dissociative drug? Something… paranormal? Who knows? I think it was hypnotism.

     The third time I was hypnotized, if that’s what the other two were, I paid for it. Literally. I made an appointment and went to a hypnotherapy practice in a strip mall and forked over cash to see whether or not it would help me quit smoking cigarettes. Now, I wasn’t a long-term, dedicated smoker but due to, as they say here in the Netherlands, circumstances, I had picked up a habit and for around a year and a half had been at something like half a pack a day. Coincidentally I also became one of the first people in my part of California to contract the brand-new-at-the-time Beijing Flu, which left me with lung scarring I hold responsible for my current later-age-onset, relatively mild asthma. Given the situation in my lungs I wanted to quit smoking but was having some trouble doing that in any way comfortably (for myself and those around me). Hypnotherapy certainly seemed worth a try.

     I honestly thought it wouldn’t work. Initially, I kept an open mind, very aware that it does work in general, for lots of people, but as the session went on I lost confidence. What happened was, during our intake appointment she asked me for a negative trigger. For something I hate. I automatically said onions, but then I realized that I was starting to like some forms of onion (caramelized, for example). Indeed, decades on now, I still don’t care much for raw onions but absolutely love them prepared in many a way, so changing that trigger was a good idea! I backtracked and told her no, make it peanut butter; that always has and always will make me gag just smelling it. She noted this down and we finished the intake. When I went back for the session itself she did the induction and I can honestly say I noticed nothing whatsoever. No lassitude, no change in my perceptions of people walking past the window outside, her clothing rustling against itself, traffic in the distance, a mockingbird declaring its local supremacy… no change. I did my best to stay relaxed like she wanted, to let myself be taken in, but I was sure nothing was happening. I was going through the motions because if you don’t at least try to do something, it’s guaranteed not to work. When she got to the negative trigger, though… she said “onions”. My increasing cynicism about what was happening blew its top at that one. I didn’t let on; I just thought to myself, “Well, there goes seventy bucks down the drain.” At the end we shook hands and she said the obligatory stuff about a free next session if I was “one of the resistant ones”, and I went on my way, convinced that nothing had happened.

     I haven’t smoked, or wanted, a cigarette since that day, 29 years ago. Go figure.

     The first time I believe I was hypnotized, as with the second, I was young and naive enough to assign some supernatural overtones to the experiences, bolstered by the crowd I hung with at the time (“hung with” being a loose term for “was tolerated by”). They were obviously more mundane than that, although in the case of the second one in no way less sinister. At the time the first one happened, I worked at a cinema, and that day I was on box office. What happened to me I now know is a classic hypnotic trick, considered one of the “oldest in the book”. I’ve even seen Derren Brown do it on TV. It somewhat horrifies me that I would be susceptible to it, and I like to pretend I wouldn’t be again, but who knows? The mind is a funny thing and, as you’ll see from the other, dangerous, incident, can be tricked into almost anything as long as it doesn’t get alarmed and start noticing what’s going on.

     Anyone at all familiar with hypnotism will start nodding as soon as I start describing this but hey, I was nineteen and worldly in all the wrong stuff. I’d never heard of the trick at the time. I was working through a line of customers for a couple of different movies. A man who I must say was attractive enough to carbonate my youthly hormones on the spot stepped up to the booth, gestured at the two women with him, and said with a dazzling smile, “Three please.” It came to eighteen bucks, I believe, or thereabouts. Mr. Charisma impressed me with his excellent eye contact as he leaned in and said, “Here’s a twenty.”

     I took it, looked at it, and gave him change. I watched him and his party walk away, hand their tickets to the door guy, and disappear through the cinema doors. I looked back down at my hand. I was holding a one dollar bill. After staring at in incomprehension for a minute I decided that I had been the victim of some sort of telepathy (damn I was a dip when I was young). I alerted the manager, omitting the supernatural theory part, took the lecture about being inattentive on the chin, and accepted that the nineteen missing dollars were coming out of my paycheck. Got called stupid for a few weeks, too, and anything misplaced of forgotten about was blamed on me. I hope they enjoyed the film at least as much as I would have liked the food I could have bought with that money, but a week of instant noodles only was hardly a first, so, well, whatever. Not cool, though, dude. Not cool.

     The next event was far more ominous. I believe it to have been a case of malicious hypnotism. Now, “everyone knows” that a hypnotist can’t “make you” do something that you really don’t want to do. This is, however, a sincerely simplistic way of looking at it. Leaving out theoretical situations involving long-term conditioning and suchlike, it is still possible for a hypnotist to trick you. If the subject is unaware of the hypnotic induction and is merely nudged rather than ordered about, a lot can be achieved. I used to know someone, back in the 80’s at university, who was unusually susceptible to suggestion and another student who was a mesmerism hobbyist managed to make him forget about the number seven just before a math exam. “Fail your exam” wouldn’t have worked, but the patter and misdirection made him completely miss the suggestion that there simply is no number between six and eight. He missed it so he didn’t "fight" it, or even think about it. I wasn’t there for the event, but was witness to some of the fallout.

     What happened to me confused me a lot at first, although as I said I was in a head space that made me interpret it as some kind of psychic trap, as though set by a telepathic predator. Over time as I became a more rational person and gained knowledge, I re-thought the incident in new lights. What I believe, although it’s of course just a working theory, is that I nearly became a victim of some form of human trafficking.

offices was a busy strip joint. Opposite said exotic dancing establishment, separated from it by a road and a parking lot, was an all-night fast food place. A lot of the time I’d get pretty hungry at around two or three in the morning, given that I had come to work straight from my cinema job and when I came off duty would need energy to go to my third job, where I mucked out stalls and worked down the dangerous horses so they’d be calmer when the trainer got there. It was normal, thus, for me to go to this fast food place, and very often, obviously, there’d be some of the girls from the strip place in there too. I got to know a couple of them in a “oh-hi-how-are-you” kind of way. Equally obviously, the area was infested with skeezoids ogling the girls and trying to get some attention, and they were just as happy to whistle at me and offer to buy me drinks as they were the strippers. It was pretty uncomfortable but nothing a young woman from that kind of area isn’t used to brushing off, which says some pretty damning things about society but there you go. There was a very regular cashier there, probably a manager because he was often working alone except for the cooks in the back, who was chatty, but not in a creepy way like a couple of the others. Not, “Hey sweetie, when do you get off work?” but “How’s it going tonight, did you catch the sporting match or latest blockbuster movie, I hear it’s going to rain.” Nice guy. Great eye contact.

     One time I found myself in there basically alone. It would have been between two and three in the morning, break time, and I had a hankering for some chicken strips with barbecue sauce. Like almost every other night for months, I left work, walked the half block to the main road, and then went up the two straight, very well lit blocks to the restaurant. It was essentially empty that night (not the first time). Nobody else ordering, a smattering of night people hunched over burgers in the dim corners, just the one cashier and a couple of people working off in the back. I ordered my chicken, took it, and walked out the door. As always, I opened a pack of sauce and began eating while I walked back to work. Usually, I would be thinking about stuff – about work, about my boyfriend (now my husband of nearly three decades), about the horses I’d be seeing soon, about whatever. This time I sort of came to myself after a while. It was like when you get to really daydreaming or zoning out and then someone gets your attention and you’re all like, “Wow, I was a million miles away!” Yeah, like that.

     And I was nowhere near work. Afterward I discovered that I had walked three blocks in the exact opposite direction to work, then two more blocks down a side street into a very dark, very deserted area. When I snapped out of it I was literally about to step blithely into a narrow, pitch-black alleyway lined with dumpsters and the back doors of warehouses and storage facilities. Was just about to walk straight on in there, not even thinking about it, in an area seething with muggings and rape and murder and proselytizers and disappearances.

     In that moment my heart rate went crazy and every flight instinct kicked in like something had leaped out at me, and I ran. Just straight up fled. It was a few minutes before I found the main road again, and made it back to work gasping and terrified – where, thanks to the general belief systems there, it was accepted as a psychic attack: people felt I had been lured telepathically toward that alleyway. What I actually believe is that in all probability I was pushed that way instead, that the chatty cashier “told me” to go there. That the ubiquity of nubile, hard-done-by working girls, many of them in states of recreationally altered consciousness or, like me, exhausted, made the area excellent hunting grounds for this kind of maneuver. I believe that what “saved” me was simply that I have good enough survival instincts that part of me noticed what I was about to do – hypnotism really is that tenuous, all it would have taken was the slightest breath of alarm to shake me out of it. And alarm there absolutely was.

     I don’t remember whether I held onto my chicken strips or not.