Fairfield University isn’t always a calm place. Its inhabitants can sometimes be loud, rowdy, and aggressive.
However, these words rarely describe freshman Mike Bennett, who was not himself last Thursday night. Bennett had been placed under a trance by Dr. Jim Wand, a stage hypnotist, who had Bennett continue to act in a suggestive state for about an hour after the show.
“Apparently, Mike was instructed to become absolutely obsessed with a street sign festival after the show had ended,” said a freshman.
Bennett, who wasn’t wearing a shirt or any shoes after he regained consciousness, immediately proceeded to tell anyone that he could about the street sign event, usually working in a large number of expletives.
“He was out of it,” said James Jessup ’10, a friend of Bennett’s who didn’t see the show. “I thought he was drunk.”
A hypnotized student roaming campus at night is not a first for Fairfield; Dr. Wand has visited the University before and performed a similar act in 2005 that had certain students fixated on making trucker hats.
“A buddy of mine did this last year,and the only thing he could talk about for a week was what kind of hat he was going to make,” FUSA President Hutch Williams ’08 noted.
Eventually, Bennett did calm down enough to go over just what he could remember from his experience.
“I remember being the one who was picked because I had been hypnotized before,” recalled Bennett. “He [Dr. Wand] had us focus on this light while he was putting us under, and I remember that I started to blur as I was following the light around and slowly that blur overcame me, and then I couldn’t see anything. I felt completely relaxed and I fell into a deep sleep, though it wasn’t really a sleep. I could still hear things, but I had zoned out.”
Dr. Wand was available for comment on the phone Saturday.
“It was a post-traumatic suggestion,” he said. “Anything you do with hypnosis after [the volunteers] come out of the hypnotic state, either for fun or also for therapy or education, is a suggestion that will carry over and assist them on whatever they want to work on.”
Bennett is not entirely without the memory of what happened
“There are some bits and pieces that I do remember. I remember dancing, I remember Natalie Portman… I remember being freaked out like something had crawled up my spine, and that I jumped out of my seat.”
Bennett did not know that during the show he had been told that he was a world-renowned butt dancer, that he would behave as though he were in a kissing contest with the celebrity of his choice, or that he would be instantly terrified by a microphone stand. He was however, fully aware of what took place after the show had ended.
“I remember taking off my shirt and after that, I felt conscious. It was an extreme adrenaline rush and I was very lightheaded,” Bennett observed.
Bennett reportedly began to calm down after he spent some time with his friends in their room. When asked if he still wanted to attend the street sign event, he had only one thing to say: “I’ll make an appearance.”
Leave a Reply