BBC: Three people were left hypnotised on stage when a hypnotist knocked himself out during a show in Dorset. David Days (show in the above picture on the right) was performing at Portland’s Royal Manor Theatre on Friday when he tripped over a participant’s leg.
His team could not rouse him and the audience was asked to leave while the people were still “asleep” on stage. They were “woken up” soon after when Mr Days recovered. His manager said the performer has a voice recording which can be used to bring people round.
However, Alan Coman, treasurer of the Royal Manor Theatre, has disputed Mr Days’ claims that he passed out and said the episode was “only a joke”. ”It was part of a project for students who were filming the whole thing… but they (the people on stage being hypnotised) weren’t pretending because they didn’t get up to help.
Audience member Fiona Faye said: “He was pulled from stage and there was loads of commotion from a number of people backstage including one man who ran to the other side of the stage to get a first aid kit.
“At first the audience, including us, found it very funny and thought it was part of the act, but as time went on we began to realise that it was not part of the show and he had actually hurt himself. ”At this point we become very worried not only for David Days but also the guests that were onstage oblivious to anything as they were still hypnotised.
“They simply just sat there ‘asleep’.”
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Have you ever had a close shave with tripping over someone/a prop on stage Derren? I was about to say moments when you think thats happening would make your heart skip a beat, unless it was in the middle of your asphixation routine!
When are people going to realise that people ‘under hypnosis’ are fully aware of everything going on? The amount of times I had to explain this after completing my City & Guilds Hypnotherapy astounded me. those people were quite capable of getting up themselves if they so wished.
Stage hypnosis has really given hypnosis as a therapeutic tool a bad impression.
Your thoughts Derren?
Fake. Makes for good advertising though.
Re-he-he-eeeallly.
I sent Derren this link on twitter yesterday, it reminded me of a previous blog where Derren pretended to hypnotise himself but was actually just sleeping, and now it has a place in his blog – exciting stuff! Ha. Not bad for a twitter beginner.
Fail…
Nice promotional story but rubbish. People will “get out of their trances” — if you’d like to call it so — when they get bored. There for this is a very cheap publicity stunt.
I am performing hypnosis in NL and UK for 11 years and I know nobody who has an emergency ‘waking up tape’. Hell I even say during me pre-talk, when something happens to me, like for example a heart attack GOD FORBID! everybody will just automatically awaken because the state you will be in is a very normal state.
Shows the true power of hypnosis, that is of course unless it is a publicity stunt.
Who’s the cheeky young scamp in the photo, looking for an autograph from the great David Days?
Funny how people are so attuned to how they’re supposed to behave when they’re hypnotized. They’re just acting within their social role and have no idea what they’re supposed to do if the hypnotist gets knocked out!
Raymond – makes sense to eliminate possibility of being “stuck” in trance during pre-talk. I seem to remember Derren doing something similar when setting up his Stuck to the Sofa stunt…
If one passes out unexpectedly, it’s good to get a physician’s evaluation.
Paul: Unless they’d convinced themselves that they couldn’t, and that fear was what was keeping them there (also, as long as you sit there ‘in trance’, you’re absolved from having to act on the emergency happening next to you, so it’s a way to avoid a stressful situation). Hypnosis, as you obviously know, is something that comes from inside, not outside magic. But if the people under hypnosis are convinced of the magic hypothesis, they may act on that. Kind of like how people that believe they are under a curse will genuinely get sick.
Of course, it may all have been an experiment (fail experiment, if that’s the case — the same thing has been done in different variations from Victorian times onward and has long since been debunked) or a publicity stunt, but it could have been genuine.
Days’ manager says it was a ‘planned fall’ – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-13662194
Also if it was some sort of experiment, he destroyed its value by telling the participants what he had planned.