Mackenzie Hurlbert – General Assignment Reporter –
Students filed into the ASC Ballroom to the beat of mystical music last Monday night when Pro Con and RHA hosted Sailesh the Hypnotist. Excited murmur spread throughout the rooms as students debated whether they should volunteer when the call came. With around a hundred seats filled, the music faded away and Sailesh took the stage to introduce himself and the act of hypnosis.
“You hypnotize yourself every day,” he said. “The average person goes into a hypnotic state of mind 60-65 times a day. The average student goes into a hypnotic state of mind about 120 times a day.”
Sailesh warmed up the crowd with a little comedy and warned that the show they were about to see was not for the easily offended. “This is, just to warn you, a rated R show,” said Sailesh. “So if you are easily offended, get the f*** out of here!”
While students laughed at his bluntness, Sailesh informed the crowd of his three golden rules; the first was nobody gets naked, the second was that personal secrets would not be revealed, and the third was that everything else is fair game.
When the call came for volunteers, students rushed to fill the 14 seats and friends in the audience laughed in anticipation. Sailesh asked for three minutes of silence as he hypnotized those in the seats along with audience members who followed his instructions. By the end of the three minutes, not only were the participants on stage asleep and under hypnosis, but some students in the audience were under his spell as well. He brought some of these audience members up to the stage to replace the participants who failed to be hypnotized; then the show began.
He wasn’t joking when he said it was an R-rated show. Sailesh convinced those under hypnosis that they were porn stars, astronauts encountering aliens on Mars, and that they were seeing him naked, first as a man who was well-hung, and then as a beautiful woman.
Sailesh informed the audience about himself and hypnosis while the volunteers behind him remained hypnotized. “The power is within your own mind,” said Sailesh who was voted by MTV Europe as the best hypnotist in the world. “I just know how to get you there.” He explained that hypnosis manipulates your subconscious: “It does not know the difference between illusion and reality.”
To prove this point, he asked one of his volunteers for his belt. The kid willingly handed it over to him unfazed. Sailesh then convinced those hypnotized that the belt had become a hissing snake, and many students cringed in fear as he waved the belt near their face.
Sailesh later convinced the volunteers that the room was on fire and they had to warn the audience in slow motion while using their left shoe as a gas mask. The group on stage ventured out into the audience to warn of the danger and offered their shoes for oxygen. After returning to the stage, Sailesh told the group they were in a band, playing instruments. The ladies played keyboards, and the men played guitars then each other’s butts.
Other acts of the night included a nerve-wracking job interview in which the hypnotized student can’t help excessively swearing when he or she becomes nervous. One of the funniest acts of the night was a Jerry Springer Show episode where the hypnotized students were guests on the show in order to get their friend help to quit a disgusting, but absolutely false, habit. The volunteers made up lies about their friends in the audience that stretched from horse-porn addictions to hiring clowns to have sex with them.
At the end of the show, once Sailesh had humiliated those on stage in as many ways he could think of, he woke the participants up and called for a round of applause. The students, who could vaguely remember what happened, received one of Sailesh’s hypnotherapy CDs.
Junior Kaley Marden enjoyed the show and had a lot of laughs. “It was hilarious,” said Marden, a business management major. “I think it would’ve been fun to go up but it was funny watching from the audience too.”
Chris Giaquinto, a freshman, volunteered to be hypnotized, this being his second time under hypnosis.
“It was a lot of fun,” he said. “I’d definitely do it again.” Giaquinto tried to describe the feeling of hypnosis: “It’s like when something funny would come up, it would register but you wouldn’t laugh. You’d know everything was going on, but you wouldn’t.”
hypnosis is sometimes used to treat psychological disorders