I . . . have always believed in hypnosis. Like, you know the hypnotist shows where they bring seven people on stage and then the hypnotist dude gets them to do embarrassing things for two hours? Until literally five minutes ago I have never questioned whether that is authentic. No! It's worse! I've never even known anyone questions the authenticity. I literally just thought this was a real thing and everyone believes in it like rain and Cher.
Skylar and I just went for a walk and I made a joke about how we need to take Duncan to a hypnotist so someone can get him to stop involuntarily bolting after motorcycles and then I was like "do you think it would be hard to hypnotize someone?" and Skylar was like "no harder than casting a spell you learned at Hogwarts."
Well then I found out that Skylar doesn't believe in hypnosis at all and I was like "what are you talking about?! Don't you learn about this in medical school?!" and he was like "yeah, we cover it right after Defense Against The Dark Arts" and I was like "THAT'S TWO HARRY POTTER JOKES IN A ROW STOP BEING LAZY."
So then I had this panic because, y'all, I am basically 60 and I've roamed this Earth for several decades just casually believing in something that might be totally fictional and I've already done that once in my life with religion I'M JUST KIDDING CALM DOWN THE LORD IS STILL MY SHEPHERD LIKE HALF THE TIME I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S TRUE ANYMORE.
But not only have I unquestioningly believed in something that might be fiction for several decades, according to Skylar this is also something that everyone around me has already known was fiction. Like, no one has ever bothered to tell me hypnotist shows are fake because they all assumed I already knew that.
I honestly feel like maybe I've believed in Santa for 36 years. And that I thought they taught the magic of Santa's sleigh in medical school. And I just told my husband that. And now he probably regrets marrying me.
I initially told Skylar that I thought he was wrong about this and I was shocked he didn't believe in something that's obviously a proven science but then I googled "are those hypnotist shows real" and the entire internet was like "yes, and the best place to go to learn how to become a hypnotist is Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" and I was like "GET A NEW JOKE INTERNET SKYLAR ALREADY USED THAT ONE BASICALLY TWICE.
So now I have no idea what's true anymore and you guys are all mad at me because I said that thing about religion EVEN THOUGH I WAS JUST JOKING MY GRANDMA GOES TO CHURCH YOU THINK I'M GOING TO DISAGREE WITH MY GRANDMA???
I'm sorry. I'm just very frazzled right now and I need you to tell me if hypnosis is a real thing and even if it's not real if I'm crazy for just believing in it for mumble mumble years. Also, is there anything else you think I might believe in that everyone knows isn't real and I have never questioned like helium or voting?
I'm very stressed.
~It Just Gets Stranger
I think hypnotism is totally real. It definitely can be faked for shows and stuff, but it can affect people. We had a hypnotist visit my psych class several years ago. From what I remember, some people are more vulnerable to it than others. It didn't work on about 2/3rds of the class, but the remaining students followed everything he said. A close friend of mine was part of the group it worked on, I wish I could remember what she said it was like. Unless all of that was faked, which I'm really hoping isn't the case. Now you have me doubting things!
ReplyDeleteI'm going to have to side with Skylar on this one. But I feel your pain, not quite as traumatic, but I recently discovered that people crying while chopping onions is apparently a real thing, and not a made up thing.
ReplyDeleteMe: When do you think Hollywood made up that chopping onions makes people cry?
Mom: What are you talking about? That's true.
Me: No it's not, onions have never made me cry
Mom: What? Do you have no tear ducts? Or soul? What kind of daughter are you? How have I never known this? Chopping onions is now your assignment permanently
Me: ....!!?? How did I not know this for 39 years? What else is true that I thought wasn't?
I can chop onions all day long with my contacts in, but if I forget and start casually chopping on a day when I wore my glasses, I can’t even open my eyes they will be glued shut from pain and tears for like an hour afterward. One time I realized that even with my eyes sealed shut involuntarily I was still chopping! Now I try really hard to do the onions super fast before the scary tears come with my glasses on, but mostly I just never ever ever wear my glasses because I like my fingers and not crying better.
DeleteSwim goggles. Will you look ridiculous wearing them in your apron with kitchen knife in hand? I'm going to guess so- I know I do. But, will you be able to cut a small field's worth of onions without shedding a single onion-fume induced tear? Yes.
DeleteChew minty bubblegum when chopping onions, it's supposed to help you not cry
DeleteOk, so I have never believed in hypnosis, I think it’s hard for me to believe that someone could relax that much just because someone tells them they are getting sleepy or swinging a watch in their face or whatever technique- but that might be the bitterness from my lifelong insomnia talking or my general inability to relax completely when people are watching me. Here’s my secret: i have always wanted hypnosis to be true, and always secretly wanted to see it happen/have someone try it on me.
ReplyDeleteI am told my sister-in-law was chosen once at a hypnotist show (not a plant) and she was hypnotized. My husband says she was told she didn't have a tongue and someone in the crowd had it and she ran around talking without using her tongue asking people if they had it. If you met my sister-in-law you would know she would never do anything like that even if she was paid. My husband and his family still laugh over it today, and it happened 20 or so years ago. Hypnosis is real!
ReplyDeleteI believe hypnosis can happen. I also believe it can be faked. Either way, I do enjoy going to the fair every year and watching Jerry Harris make big ol' cowboys dance like ballerinas. One year, he had them all driving cars. He told them to check their mirrors before they pulled out. They all did it except this one teenage girl at the end. She was fixing her hair and eyebrows in the mirror.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in high school. There was an assembly in the gym where a hypnotist was brought in. Can you imagine that today? This was the dark ages, the 80s. My younger brother volunteered and at some point they gave him a hot foot and he pulled off his shoe and started beating his foot with it. He had bruises! But that's not the important part. The important part is when he pulled off his shoe he had a great big hole in his sock with his toe sticking out. Everyone turned around and looked at ME like his socks were my job! I wanted to melt through the bleachers.
But I still like to watch cowboys dance like ballerinas.
You may be onto something with the voting one.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, I had a dream that you were writing a musical, and a bunch of us had temporarily moved into some big house or old church or something to practice it.
This sounds like the best next project for Strangers to be part of!
DeleteI used to think wild sunflowers were dangerous. You know, the ones you see growing on the side of the road? Don't get too close because they are wild. It's right there in the name! The giant ones that farmers grow or you can grow in your garden? Those are fine. They are tame.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe those crazy hypnotist shows are true, but my mom saw a hypnotist to give up smoking in the 80s and she swears that it worked!
ReplyDeleteI saw one of those hypnotist shows in college once and totally believed it! A couple years later, though, I went to one of those weight loss hypnosis places a few times (Daddy was paying) and it never worked on me. But I want to believe it works on some people!
ReplyDeleteI definitely believe in hypothesis, but I don' think it works for all people. My school had a hypothnist come in, I thought it was all a ploy until my sister was hypnotized. It's was odd.
ReplyDeleteI don't know but the "Lord is my shepherd like half the time" bit made me snort.
ReplyDeleteYou made me and my husband question everything and this is what we found. It is real ! https://time.com/5380312/is-hypnosis-real-science/
ReplyDeleteMy university hosted a hypnotist at the beginning of each fall semester and it was my favorite show of all time. I do believe it’s real but it definitely doesn’t work on everyone. I have a feeling it’s more likely to work on someone who believes in it so skylar will probably never believe it’s real because it will never work on him.
ReplyDeleteThe hypnotist would start with 20 or so people on stage to put them under. And there were always several that would get dismissed because it didn’t work on them. And then even mid-show people would come out of it and you could visibly see them “wake up” in confusion before being led off stage. By the end he would be working with only a handful of people that took to it really well. So I think it’s definitely real with a large spectrum of effectiveness.
And even if it’s not real, it’s amazing entertainment and I don’t care if they are faking. It’s more fun to believe in it!
Oh man, hypnosis is real. It only works on some people. We went to a show at the fair and my introverted friend we dragged along got hypnotized from the audience. The hypnotist was delighted that she was so vulnerable to it. He had her up on stage clucking like a chicken and singing Lady Marmalade and she kept trying to take her shirt off so he sent her back to the audience. It was wild. She did not believe us that she had done any of that and was mortified when we showed her the video.
ReplyDeleteOther than that event, I have seen patients use hypnotism to stop smoking. Very effective!
I don’t know about the shows. They could totally be fake but at least they are fun to watch. I do, however, think there is something to the hypnosis to quit smoking or lose weight only because I believe in the power of subliminal thought. I do yoga and have learned how to get really relaxed so if I get anxious, stressed or what not, I use the yoga breathing to get super relaxed and I tell myself things to calm me down and it works..anecdotally. I do think that if someone else was putting thoughts in my head while I was really deeply relaxed like that it would work on me on a subliminal level. Wow, I didn’t know I believed that until JUST NOW. Anyway, I’m going to go relax and tell myself not to eat chips and see how that works out.
ReplyDeleteI think you should view hypnotism with some skepticism because it can be faked, but I also believe it's possible. I've heard that you cannot be hypnotized if you don't want to be because you have to allow yourself to relax and give over control of your actions. So I think for people who don't beleive in it, it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy where they are never going to allow themselves to be in that state. I have seen a few hypnotism acts where things have happened that I find unlikely to have been faked. In one instance (both of these take place in high school) one girl was directed to take her shoes off and later I think a boy was told he was angry with the girl for something? (My memory is a little hazy on this) so the boy ended up grabbing one of her shoes and chucking it into the rafters of the gym we were in, getting it stuck up there, after being woken at the end of the show the girl genuinely seemed to have no clue where her other shoe was despite having watched it get thrown in the ceiling under hypnosis. In the other instance the hypnotist allowed people in the audience to be hypnotised and then he went through and pulled those students out of the audience. However, after the show we all went back to class and a teacher noticed a student behaving a little off like she wasn't fully aware of what was happening the teacher then used a couple of the trigger words the hypnotist had set up during the show and the student responded to them as was directed in the hypnotism. It turned out she had been hypnotised in the audience but not noticed to bring down to the floor so she also wasnt given the cue to snap out of hypnosis and the school had to call the hypnotist and have him talk to the student to snap her out of it. I've seen students go to pains to get out of class, but faking hypnotism seems a little extreme so personally I feel like it's possible.
ReplyDeleteI am 100% a believer in hypnotism. For part of my senior grad night they hired a hypnotist, and I totally expected it to be fake, and like, only the drama kids would volunteer and OF COURSE it would be over the top silly. But then. A boy I grew up with and knew since we were 4 volunteered to be hypnotized. This guy was as Peter Priesthood as they come, and always super serious, and grew up to be a super smart scientist - it was so out of character for him to even want to do something like that. He was hypnotized, and made to believe it was scorching hot AND he was itchy from head to toe. He started like, violently scratching himself and removing his clothes. Even when the hypnotist snapped everyone out of their hypnosis, he kept on itching and writhing. The hypnotist literally stopped the show and rushed him off the stage to snap him out of it. It was crazy surreal!
ReplyDeleteAlso, I do EMDR for trauma with my therapist which is kind of like hypnosis, and it dredges memories and thoughts out of me that I NEVER would be able to attain on my own. So yeah, my 11-year old is waiting on her letter from Hogwarts, and hypnotism is real.
I was thinking the same thing about EMDR! If alternating sound in my ears and buzzing paddles in my hands can light up my brain like the 4th of July, then who knows what else is possible?
DeleteOk, so I work for a dog bakery, we make treats and custom cakes. One of our business friends is a pet psychic. She is amazing. Also, you should totally bring the pups in for some treats. Delasdoggydesserts.com
ReplyDeleteI believed in hypnosis until my conversion therapist tried it on me, and I had to pretend to be regressed back to the pre-existence to kill the gender-confused part of myself, at which point I realized that hypnosis is fake, conversion therapy is stupid, and I’m actually quite happy to be a homosexual.
ReplyDeleteStill, I’d love the chance to pretend to pee my pants on stage. Where can I sign up?
It doesn't work where you swing a pocket watch in front of a unwilling person and they are now under your control. It doesn't work like Get Out. But some people are really open to suggestion and other people are really good at making suggestions. I don't think dogs fit into those categories, and I don't think medical school is a great place to learn about things that aren't modern western medicine, like hypnotism or politics or baking or knitting, which exist whether or not doctors are taught about them.
ReplyDeleteHypnosis works in the sense that the subject is willing to be hypnotized, in my opinion. So people can fake it, and other people can be impervious to it, because their minds are closed to the suggestions.
ReplyDeleteI have had four pregnancies, and I trained in the hypnobirthing method for my third birth, and the difference was amazing. Since hypnobirthing amounts mostly to self hypnosis, it was really mostly about the power of positive thinking. I believe there are many scientific studies regarding the healthful aspects of meditation and positivity.
If someone disregards hypnosis because the subject has to be willing to be hypnotized, then they are (in my opinion) greatly undermining the power of the brain.
Also, crying while chopping onions is a real thing, but it depends on the strength/heat of the onion. All yellows are not equal. Nor are all whites, etc. I cry maybe 30 or 40 percent of the time, and that’s when I know it will be a really powerful one!
I remember how disappointed one daughter was when I told her mermaids weren’t real. For another daughter, it was unicorn. For my son, it was zombies. And I thought he would be GLAD or relieved to know those weren’t real. Go figure . . .
I don't understand. Are you saying Harry Potter isn't real?!
ReplyDelete