The phrase “You’re getting very, very sleepy…” paired with a swinging pendulum or a monochrome swirling pattern induces people into a deep sleep and subjects them to total mind control. This is how most people perceive hypnosis, due to its portrayal in TV shows and movies.
Many of the students who volunteered to go onstage and get hypnotized by Frank Perri during a recent Community Time expected to be controlled as such.
The event featured many hypnotic prompts: putting participants to sleep, asking them to imagine extreme hot and cold temperatures, act like different ages, and more. A few individuals struggled with the simplest of tasks, like picking up a hundred dollars from two feet away from them, counting to ten without forgetting the number four and moving their limbs.
Each student’s actions tracked Perri’s words, as they appeared to be in a deep trance. When they became disengaged at any time, they would be led back into the audience.
For the Upper School, this Community Time was a success, providing students and faculty with a valuable break from a stressful academic period. It remained a popular topic of conversation for days afterward.
“It’s out of the norm for what we usually do during Community Times,” Gabe Meinstein ‘26 said. “It was beyond entertainment. It was pretty funny, and got people engaged.”
In several instances, the students’ hypnotized actions seemed exaggerated, evoking amusement and laughter from the audience. However, these reactions raised a question: Were the students in a truly hypnotic state or were they acting in front of a large audience? There seemed to be a variety of experiences.
“I wanted to have fun and I wanted to see for myself if it was real,” Ben Creighton ‘26 said, speaking on why he volunteered. “If I wasn’t up there and I wasn’t hypnotized, I’d definitely think it was fake.”
“I wanted it to work,” Anna Ramirez ‘24, another one of the volunteers, said. “I don’t know if I believed it, but one of my friends did it in Middle School. I wanted it to work so bad that it worked.”
“It’s like my third eye opened,” Meinstein said. He had kept up his act of hypnosis even after getting released from the stage early on.
Those who felt hypnotized noted that they maintained awareness throughout the experience, but were strongly inclined to follow Perri’s suggestions. Some were enthusiastic to do something similar again, while others felt unnerved by the experience.
The students who had been onstage were interrogated by classmates and friends on the topic afterward.
“You would talk to people and they were like ‘Oh, I was 100% faking it,’” Ramirez said. “I think that sucks because, for the people that didn’t fake it, it makes them not believable.”
Perri ended the experience with a lesson about the power of self-confidence. If students were able to believe that it was 100 degrees or negative 100 degrees inside the Art Center and feel the extreme heat and cold, they could imagine themselves achieving anything they wanted and becoming that version of themselves.
This is the true secret of hypnotic influence. Hypnosis is real, but not in the way many think it to be. Perri does not have supernatural mind-control powers, cannot put students to sleep, and cannot reveal their deepest, darkest secrets against their will.
Hypnosis is nothing more than a state of deep relaxation and concentration. This complete shut-out of external distractions opens up the mind to suggestions from the hypnotist. Everything that the students experienced on stage was attributed to the power of their minds.
Although the community time was planned as entertainment for Upper School students, the practicality of hypnosis in the larger world transcends a simple magic act. Hypnosis has been used to treat many common medical conditions, such as anxiety and depression, that stem from psychological factors. By altering patients’ brainwaves and behavior, allowing them to self-heal in ways that cannot be accessed when fully conscious.
“A lot of people came up to me afterward and they were like, ‘I know someone who did [hypnotherapy] to quit smoking,’” Ramirez said. “[Hypnosis] does what you want it to do if you believe in it.”