Important Advice: Don't Follow the Blinking Martini Glass

My college once hired a hypnotist to perform for the student body. I had always been incredibly curious about what it was like to be hypnotised, but I also had reservations about being made a fool in front my peers. That was a job I usually reserved for myself.

Most hypnosis volunteers I had seen in the past ended up like this:

I was especially nervous because I secretly find Cameron Diaz funny and once laughed a little too hard during a screening of "The Holiday." In the end, curiosity won out and I bum rushed the stage when the guy asked for participants. He told us that anyone who wanted to volunteer could come up, but for some reason everyone got needlessly competitive about getting up there.

The hypnotist looked ridiculous...

...but the first thing he did was make fun of my plaid shorts. This was ironic but also probably somewhat fair.

Finally, it was time for him to do his voodoo magic. This is when things went terribly wrong.

He started with small tricks like making us believe that we could not separate our clasped hands. The crowd chuckled as we tried to pry them apart. But then he made us "sleep." When he snapped his fingers, we all slumped over. He began giving us instructions about how we would believe we were driving race cars at top speeds. When he snapped his fingers, everyone on stage was going wild.

Everyone but me, that is. I was somehow rendered completely incapable of speech, movement, cognition, or non-zombie-like behavior.

I just sat there uselessly. Several photos taken from the audience revealed that my pupils were dilated to the size of dinner plates. At first everyone thought it was pretty funny.

But as the show continued and the hypnotist created new, hilarious scenarios, I remained in a drooling, baby-like state. People started getting nervous, not sure if this was normal.

I could hear and see everything that was happening, but I was simply unable to react properly to stimuli. I started to notice that even the hypnotist was looking at me a little worriedly. I would have become upset, but nothing really seemed to matter in my morphine-like condition. Not even the drool that was collecting around my chair.

Finally, when he snapped us all out of it, I kinda came back to. People crowded around telling me they were relieved and asking me what had happened. I really couldn't explain. I think I was still in a bit of a daze, like after one of those naps that lasts too long and stays with you for a while.

A few days later, I overheard someone I didn't know point me out to his friends and say, "That's that kid on drugs." I was disturbed but figured I had misunderstood. Then it happened again. And then a third time. I learned that everyone who didn't know me on campus assumed that I was addicted to heavy narcotics based on the hypnotist show. Apparently being hypnotised wasn't a logical enough explanation.

And that's the unlikely story of how I got street cred.