I said in a previous post that I am not a fan of hypnotism. It’s probably the only kind of magic I don’t like.
Maybe also troublewit.
But there’s one kind of magic I love and that’s faux hypnotism.
The kind of trick where regular magic techniques leave you with a sense of missing time or involuntary compliance without the coercive act of actually performing hypnosis.
Of course if you don’t know the difference it might feel similarly violating, which is why I love the premise behind the TV show Severence.
Umm… Spoilers for series 1 of Severence I guess.
Severence, for those who skipped the spoiler warning regardless, is a science fiction show about people who work in an office, and do literally nothing else¹. From their perspective, they wake up in an office with no memories of their life and when they leave for the day, the elevator doors close, open, and they walk back into the office as if no time has passed.
This is because they have a chip in their brain which activates and cuts them off from their memories of the outside world. Because for every office worker who never gets to leave, there is a person out in the world who goes to work in a morning, steps into an elevator, and when they step out again, a workday has passed which they have no memory of. They’re more like two people in the same body rather one person with two sets of memories, and they refer to each other as the innie and the outie.
In the show there is a protocol called the Overtime Contingency, activated as a last resort when the company needs to urgently obtain information from an innie when they are not in the building. When activated the innie wakes up wherever the outie happened to be. Then, when deactivated, the outie has no memory of what transpired.
Does that sound like any kind of magic trick?
Oh yeah, it sounds like hypnotism².
I’m still working on this but I imagine it working a little like this:
You sit at a table with two friends and a boxed deck of cards. You bring out your phone and ask the first one for their full name. You type this into an app and the screen says ‘Connection active’ with a timer slowly counting up seconds from zero.
you have two buttons, one which toggles between ‘activate’ and ‘deactivate’, and one which says ‘disconnect’.
You ask them to name a card. Let’s say they choose “Six of hearts”. You immediately hit ‘activate’ when they’ve said it. That friend’s expression changes and you say “Hi, me again. I wonder if I could ask you to go through that deck and turn over the six of hearts, then square it all up and put it back in the box.
They follow your instructions and put the box down, and you hit ‘deactivate’. Friend says “Ow, what was that noise?”.
You tell them not to worry about it open the box, go through the cards and show that the six of hearts they named is upside down. Friend is amazed, looking at the cards, asking “How did you do it?”.
You say you’ll show them and hit ‘Disconnect’ on the app. Turn to the other friend, ask for their full name. Type it in as your other friend puts the cards back in the box.
When the box is back on the table, ask the other friend to name a card. Lets say they say “Five of diamonds”.
You hit the activate button and the second friend hears a high pitched sound from the phone and the timer jumps forward about 50 seconds.
You hit the ‘disconnect’ button, then open the box and spread through the deck to show one card is face down, and it’s the five of diamonds.
This effect relies upon you having a stooge for the first friend, who will pay along and then surreptitiously switch the deck for an invisible deck when the other friend is telling you their full name.
The “app” is this web page. Type any name and it gives the same interface, but if you put a space after the name the interface does nothing except toggle the activate/deactivate button.
Without the space, the interface works differently. When you hit the activate button it plays a high pitched noise and skips the timer forward by a set duration.
If you type the word ‘overtime’ as a username it gives you a settings page so the duration of missing time roughly matches what you intend to pretend they did.
Check it out, it’s the Nulanima OCP on MageTools. The password is Jerxian.
But wait, there’s more!
So this is a pretty dull usage of this app, I’m sure people who play with faux hypnosis will have way better ideas of how to use it. What I like however is that the sound it makes is so annoying that when a person has had this used once, if they hear it again (perhaps before or during another trick³) they’re bound to remember it and wonder if you used it somehow as part of the method. I like the idea of driving a person to literal insanity using it.
¹ The work is mysterious and important.
² It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a philosophical clusterfuck.
³ There are so many premises you could use this with. Item to impossible location, predictions in hard to reach places, slipping an object into someone’s pocket and then vanishing a duplicate later. If it’s an effect which could be acheived by simply erasing a chunk from someone’s memory, you can use this as a premise. Also, anything which is an instant visual change, you can time to happen with the activation sound.