Amateur Hypnotist Gets a Bunch of Girls Stuck in a Trance, Has to Call in an Expert for Help

Amateur Hypnotist Gets a Bunch of Girls Stuck in a Trance, Has to Call in an Expert for Help It seems like the most valuable skill a hypnotist could have—besides being able to hypnotize people, I suppose—is the ability to bring someone back out of a trance, but apparently that was one thing that a young Canadian hypnotist didn't quite have a handle on. Maxime Nadeau, 20, put a group of 12- and 13-year-old girls into a hypnotic state as part of an end-of-school show at a high school in Quebec. But then he couldn't snap them out of it; so he had to call his mentor, Richard Whitbread, to come down and help them. What a hilarious phone call that must have been. Uh, yeah, hey Richard. Say, hypothetically, that you'd just hypnotized a bunch of young girls and you couldn't wake them back up. What would you do? Whitbread arrived after an hour and found a couple of the girls with their heads on the table and others "clearly in a trance." He said, "The eyes were open and there was nobody home." Creepy. He broke the spell by convincing the girls they were being re-hypnotized and then he "brought them out with a stern voice." Wait, that's all they needed? Interesting—though it didn't work on one of the girls who was reportedly was under for five hours. FIVE HOURS. Nadeau never panicked about what he'd accomplished because, he said, "it wasn't dangerous." He added "Being in a trance is a state of well-being. I wasn't stressed. I knew they would get out of it." After they finally did get out of it, one of the girls described her experience: "I don't know how to explain it. It's like you're no longer there. You're spaced out." That sounds kind of nice, actually. Though perhaps it's better not to overindulge since after the trance was lifted, 13 students reported they had headaches or nausea.