By Sarah Souli



The room was exactly how it should be if you were going to get hypnotized: all glossy brown wood, the shelves lined with thick dusty books, containing several lifetimes’ worth of knowledge. The lights were dimmed so that the whole space glowed warmly, and the chairs were arranged in a wide circle; the effect was something like a hug. In the middle stood Nahum, clad in flowing black fabric, his dark curls brushed off his tanned forehead. Exactly how a hypnotizer should look.

The rest of us — the hypnotees, if you will — were rather ramshackle. We arrived after dinner, some of us slightly dulled from the flowing Portuguese wine. Some of us had been hypnotized before and knew what to expect, but most of us had not. We stood in the corridor, pacing and talking to each other. We had all chosen to be there, but apprehension had started to mix with the excitement, and now some of us were second-guessing our initial curiosity.

There is something particularly magical about walking into a situation you have only a passing familiarity with. I do not mean this to be true in all of life’s situations — a friend of mine, who understands the rough mechanics of massage, booked a Groupon for what turned out to be a session in an unmarked industrial building. The masseuse was a middle-aged Bulgarian man in a track suit who started the session by screaming at my friend, then covering her body in canola oil and flicking her thighs with his fingers, all to the pulsating beat of an Aviici club mix, while telling her nonstop about his time living in Afghanistan. (“For the rock and roll” he responded when she asked why he lived there.) In the end, he tenderly wiped all the canola oil off with a piece of toilet paper.

But unknown situations are guaranteed to be magical when they happen at the House of Beautiful Business. And that’s especially true if they involve Nahum, an artist who also works in philosophy, computer science, and music. He became obsessed with magicians at an early age. “There was a point where magicians were considered real magicians, and the magic they were performing was absolutely real,” he explained to HyperAllergic several years ago. “And that’s the point where I have a little bit of conflict. Like, I don’t believe in that kind of real, real magic.”

As I took my seat in the circle, I started mentally berating myself for not allowing myself to indulge fully in the unknown. I’m a journalist, which means, rather obnoxiously, that I will research everything to death before taking part in it (that’s how I know never to buy a Groupon for a massage). I knew that Nahum wasn’t going to be swinging a pocket watch in my face — that method was introduced by the Scottish eye surgeon James Braid in the mid-19th century, and is better suited to television than real life.

And I already knew that Nahum was going to take me to the moon, by using the suggestive power of hypnosis. I already knew that I would bounce along the craggy surface of our lunar planet, turning around to see the marble-y blue and green sphere of home suspended in the inky black sky. I had already Googled, “Is hypnosis dangerous?” (Answer: No, unless you have a severe mental illness).

Hypnosis has received a lot of flack over the years. “Fueling the perception of hypnosis as a distinct trancelike state is the widespread assumption that it leads to marked increases in suggestibility, even complete compliance to the therapist’s suggestions,” states an article from The Scientific American. “Nowhere is this zombielike stereotype portrayed more vividly than in stage hypnosis shows, in which people are seemingly induced to bark like dogs, sing karaoke and engage in other comical behaviors in full view of hundreds of amused audience members.”

But I wasn’t prepared for the feeling of it all. Nahum began to speak, his voice soft and melodic, a Spanish-tinged English that first rose me from my bed, guided me down a flight of stairs and onto a chair. The chair was a rocket, and we exploded into the sky, moving with all the ferociousness of an Apollo space shuttle. My head felt heavy, like in the movies, and there was a strong pressure throttling the back of my head. I would later see a photo of myself: shoulders stooped, chin touching my neck.

The hypnosis lasted an hour, though it really felt like fifteen minutes. It sort of reminded me of a guided meditation, but with none of the muscle pain that comes from crossing your legs for an hour. Or maybe that feeling when you are so “in the zone” you forget the time and space you’re in.

“Hypnosis is a totally natural state for the human mind to be in — absolutely everybody has been hypnotized literally thousands of times in their life without necessarily knowing it,” writes hypnosis aficionado Terrence Watts. “You pass through the hypnotic state whenever you go to sleep and when you awaken again. We are all subject to naturally occurring trance states at other times, too. If you have ever been reading, watching TV, or totally engrossed in some other activity, then became gradually aware of somebody saying something like: ‘Hey! I’m talking to you!’– that is a form of hypnosis.”

Nahum’s voice guided us through the sky to the moon, where we were supposed to get out of our rocket chairs and walk around. I couldn’t — my mind and body were so exhausted from the voyage that I stayed in the chair, suspended in space, looking between Earth and the moon. Having made it all the way there, I can assure you that the moon really does look like cheese, only a little more gray than yellow.

Sarah is a freelance journalist based in Athens. Her work has been featured in The New Republic, The Economist, The Guardian, Vice, and others. She is a contributing writer to the Journal of Beautiful Business.