stage hypnosis

Back­ground: In junior high Eng­lish class, one of the exer­cis­es was to take a card from a rack, read the arti­cle or sto­ry on it, then answer a series of ques­tions based on that arti­cle or sto­ry. The racks were divid­ed by read­ing lev­el, and most of the stu­dents, includ­ing myself, were giv­en cards from the aver­age lev­el read­ing lev­el. The prob­lem was that even then, I was read­ing at a col­lege lev­el (I read one of my old­er broth­ers’ text­books, “Mythol­o­gy” by Edith Hamil­ton, at the age of 8, and was then answer­ing whole columns (in the form a ques­tion, of course) labeled “Mythol­o­gy” while watch­ing “Jeop­ardy” soon after­ward ) and the selec­tions I was giv­en were rather bor­ing. That was when I decid­ed to try some­thing from the advanced rack, and it turned out to be one of those strange hyp­no­sis-relat­ed coin­ci­dences that pop up every so often in my life.

The arti­cle was enti­tled ‘Secrets of the Sleep Mer­chants’ and it described how carny stage hyp­no­tists of the ear­ly 20^th Cen­tu­ry used tricks like chlo­ro­form or hashish to help induce their sub­jects. Every­thing was told from the point of view of the author describ­ing how his father used these tricks. It was a remark­able coin­ci­dence, as by even then I had a strong inter­est in hyp­no­sis. At that time, I decid­ed I would find a copy of this arti­cle for myself, as this was only an abbre­vi­at­ed ver­sion, so I was sure that I mem­o­rized the title of both the arti­cle and the mag­a­zine it was in, “True, the Men’s Mag­a­zine”. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I soon dis­cov­ered that the libraries did­n’t col­lect the mag­a­zine. For years, I would peri­od­i­cal­ly make a slight effort at locat­ing the arti­cle or the mag­a­zine, with no suc­cess, search­ing at paper col­lec­tors con­ven­tions and approach­ing col­lec­tors, and, then, lat­er, search­ing eBay: of course, it did­n’t help that I could only remem­ber the year of pub­li­ca­tion, 1955 (my birth year) but not the month.