Hypnotic Acts (Patreon)

Magic is all about managing the audience expectations. It’s about the difference between what they think they know and what reality is. If they think you have a ball in your right hand, and you don’t, it’s impressive when you open your hand and reveal it to be empty. Setting up the expectations is something that happens in the mind of the audience member, and most often it is failing to do that properly that is the downfall of a trick.

Take for instance body swapping, which is a trick I’ve worked on for many years for my mentalist show. Through powerful suggestion you can get someone to believe, for a few minutes, that his body has been altered. You can perform that on two persons at the same time, making the appearance of a brief body swap. Very quickly though they realize that they are in fact in the same body as their entire life up to that point once what they see and feels lines up with their memories and experiences. The world as painted by the trick doesn’t conform to reality.

What really made this work was when I realized that you could have the participants believe that their “souls” swapped between the bodies, so that they would possess not only the body, but also the memory and mind of the host. There is no real way of disproving that this is the case, so the illusion, weak as it may be, holds. Unless I break the “swap” the participants will believe that they are in the wrong body for days or weeks, until it kind of becomes unimportant and they go on with their lives.

And here is the kicker. Since they “swap” into a different body, they accept any suggestions I add as something that was already in there, but suppressed. A secret that they find in the new body. Like “Greg would like to exercise a lot, but is afraid of being judged” or “Stephen likes vegetarian food, but is afraid it looks unmanly” or “Greg secretly loves Stephen”, for example. They are then free to reassess and act on these feelings, e.g. “Greg may be shy to exercise, but now that I have his body I can do that as much as I want.” Since these are life changes they do after the swap, and had a reason to not do before, it reinforces that the swap was actually real.

Ultimately it is not a very interesting stage act, since all the magic happens inside the heads of the two participants. I only bring it out when I perform small rooms at parties or corporate events. Then everyone can properly talk to the participants after and realize that they are still body swapped, as far as they know. So far I’ve made more than two dozens of dudes change their lives to eat healthy, work out properly and fall in love with each other.