Psychology and AP Psychology students went on an in-school field trip to the Black Box to learn about the nature of hypnotism, where mixed emotions were common.

“About 80% of the students were skeptical about the whole ordeal with the hypnotist. A lot of the students walked in carefully to make sure there was no trick to the event,” said junior Maddilyn Desens.

After the students settled into their seats, the hypnotist showed up to the center of the area.

“Jeff Jay, the hypnotist, first did a few relaxation exercises with the students to get them started. These also served as an evaluation tool for Jeff to see who would be most ‘hypnotizable’,” said psychology teacher Catherine Dodd.

After that, several students were selected to be hypnotized and become part of the performance.

“He told the ones being hypnotized to go to sleep, and if anyone in the audience fell asleep to let him know so he could mess with them too,” said senior Nick Gritsenko.

Jay had the students who were hypnotized lay down and sleep for about thirty seconds. At that point, eight minutes had gone by.

“He told the kids to act like they were on an airplane, and at first, it was peaceful, and then, it all changed. He told them the person next to them was loud and obnoxious, and the plane was getting hotter. You could see people sweating. It was kind of creepy. Then, he had them laughing harder than what would seem to be regular to a normal human,” Gritsenko said.

The hypnotist was then telling the male students to dance like they were “too sexy for their shirts.”
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One of my peers was dancing by tugging at his shirt as though he were going to take it off,” Desens said.

The next thing he had the hypnotized kids do was act as though they were four-years-old again.

“After he told them to act like four-year-olds, he gave everyone in the audience about three suckers and then told them to go around and ‘trick-or-treat’ with the surrounding members,” Desens said.

Once they were done trick-or-treating, the kids were warned not to eat any of the candy because soon after, he said that the candy was now bees.

“The kids were freaking out for a while, some ‘crying’, but shortly after he calmed them down and sent them back to a deep sleep,” Gritsenko said.

At last, the students were finally out of their hypnotic trance.

“Some of the students who were hypnotized said that they had no recollection, or very little memory, of the things they did while under hypnosis,” Dodd said.

This entire performance was for the students’ unit which was on consciousness.

“The consciousness objective was to describe various states of consciousness and their impact on behavior and describe historic and contemporary uses of hypnosis. Some of the consciousness unit objectives included students being able to describe various states of consciousness and their impact on behavior and explain hypnotic phenomena. The hypnosis presentation augmented the class content, and the students were able to make connections between what they experienced and what they learned in class,” Dodd said.