My Spiritual Journey Through Cards Against Hypnosis

By: LJ Katch, Contributor

David Hall is a comedic hypnotist and mentalist who blessed the stage of the Cat in the Cream, and my mind, on the night of February 15th, at 8 pm. For this piece, I need you to see the show through my eyes; imagine it like you were there, like you are me: 

The crowd is bustling, the energy is high. I’m swaying in my seat, my mind buzzing as I prepare for the unknown. I’ve never been to a hypnosis show, I don’t even know if it’ll work. But David walks on stage in a blue velvet jacket and a slicked back mohawk, and I know he’ll take care of me, he’ll take care of all of us. 

David’s a mentalist and so of course we are first subjected to some mind games. There is the usual guessing of words and numbers in people’s heads that every telepath learns on their first day of wizard school. The audience indulges him in the admittedly impressive tricks, but there is an obvious impatience in our “oohs” and “ahhs”. We’re not here to see David the mentalist, we’re here for hypnosis- the real goddamn deal. When David announces that he’ll need 11 volunteers for the hypnosis portion of his show, the audience erupts in raised hands and screams. David surveys the audience with his pale blue eyes for the strongest of us, those with the will to be taken to a “deeper state”. He calls up the chosen few and I grin with my audience members in anticipation. 

David asks the audience to be absolutely silent, as he is about to do something called hypnotic induction. He asks the volunteers to close their eyes, and for five minutes he repeats the same commands: relax your muscles, feel how heavy your hands are, breathe, etc. In these five minutes, the audience holds their breaths, watching the participants as their heads fall and looking for signs as to whether they are faking it or not. That’ll be the question for the whole night: who’s in it for real.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting in the audience, my mouth gaping open and for some reason feeling like I’m about to cry. What is it about watching these people fall into a deep relaxed state that provokes a deeper emotion in me? Is it shock? Is it a desire to be as at peace as them? The entire audience sits in a trance just like those on stage, holding our breaths as he asks the participants to try to open their eyes. Nobody does. He snaps his fingers and every person on stage keels over. 

The format of the “Cards Against Hypnosis” show is as follows: David will give us a prompt such as “when you wake up you will believe you are the famous celebrity ___” and the audience gets to choose whether they believe they are Taylor Swift or Beyonce (we chose Beyonce). He then gives his instructions: he makes one person Beyonce, two people back up dancers, and a third person a superfan who knows all the words to the song. Everyone else plays the part of VIP fans. When they all wake up, “Single Ladies” is playing, three people get up and start dancing, and my friend Natalia grabs the mic and starts singing her heart out, missing several words but fully convinced she knows them all. 

For the first few rounds of the game I am absolutely mesmerized; every moment of absurdity makes me laugh uncontrollably while my heart skips a beat. The participants, under the influence of hypnosis, act like exaggerated caricatures. When David tells them they feel hot, people start fanning themselves dramatically, and when he tells them they feel cold, they shiver. It almost looks like the participants are playing a game of charades, as if they’re subconsciously in on the joke too while simultaneously convinced it’s real. 

 An early highlight is when David discovers an audience member who has also been hypnotized and invites them onto the stage. He makes everyone believe he has a pen that shoots  invisible darts that can put them to sleep, and we laugh as he flicks his pen at each seemingly conscious person and they drop like flies in their seats. Particularly hilarious is the moment he gives the pen to a participant excited to be put to sleep and she shoots herself with the pen and she crumples.

Other highlights include: a guy convinced he has a hilarious joke to tell but who, every time he tries to tell it, cannot stop laughing; a participant who when asked what they’ll spend the million dollars they just won in Vegas on, replies “women”; a participant going up to an audience member and petting it because he thinks they’re a koala; and a very raunchy hip hop rendition of the ABCs. 

As the show goes on, it becomes clear that some people were incredibly under the influence, and some were not. One participant in red seems to be completely aware and almost wishing to be off the stage, but most are in an ambiguous gray area, leaving me to guess who’s in it and who’s playing it up for the audience, not wanting to break the magic of the show. My favorite dubious moment is a participant who, when instructed to see her favorite celebrity in front of her and asked who it was, says that she “didn’t remember their name” but she’s looking at “the lead singer of the Beatles”. 

Ultimately, the show loses its hold over me due to its length. As the audience gets over the shock factor of hypnosis, the actions of the participants become less electrifyingly odd. Still, even after an hour and a half of hypnotic shenanigans I give David a standing ovation for rocking my world. Plus, I get a fun encore after the show when I corner some of the participants.  

My friend Natalia confirms she was pretty much gone the entire time. “It felt real,” she tells me. “I don’t remember that well.” 

“I just remember I was asleep and then I was at a concert,” she says. “I was supposed to know all the lyrics to the song, but I didn’t.” When I try to ask her about how she could think she knew all the lyrics and not at the same time, she can’t really give me an answer. From what I can tell, she doesn’t quite know. 

“It’s more like the intense feeling,” says Aahil. He’s the memorable participant who had the funny joke and pet the koala. He wasn’t necessarily seeing Beyonce or a koala, but he experienced the feelings associated with those experiences. 

“There was nothing visual,” says Elijah, who describes being half aware of the hypnosis. “It’s like you’re waking up and you’re not sure if something’s part of the dream.” 

At one point in the show Elijah recited a heavy metal rendition of the ABCs. Elijah remembers performing and was aware that he was a part of a show, but apparently he doesn’t remember yelling.

“I just thought I was singing it regularly,” Elijah reports. “But then my throat started to hurt.” 

Megan is the participant I talked to who was the most aware throughout the show, but even she was fully hypnotized for the first section. 

“I genuinely could not open my eyes,” she says. “But the laughter brought me out of it.”

Natalia agrees, the thing that broke the hypnotic trance the most was the laughter intruding their peaceful state of mind. 

Hypnosis seemed to be a positive state for most of the participants. Even when Megan was aware, she felt calmer. 

“I was cognizant in a meditative way,” she says. 

“There wasn’t a lot of stage fright,” Elijah tells me. “It was fun to play along.”

“I feel super rested,” Natalia declares as we go separate ways. “I feel like I was asleep for ten years.”