He was middle-aged, and yet, youthfully handsome. Strangely familiar, and yet, oddly compelling. Dressed in a suit of black and red, with a white shirt on under his coat, his white cuffs gleaming from the stage. He had a mysterious and slightly menacing presence about him that definitely fit his profession. I had seen this magician’s show once before, earlier in the dream, and I knew there was a part where audience members were selected to be hypnotized onstage before being impossibly “teleported” into various boxes on the other end of the stage. We were at that part. I remember looking around and realizing I was the only person sitting in my section--the earlier show had been a full house. I moved closer to the others to be less noticeable, worried that I might be selected if I stood out too much in such a small audience.
“No, not me,” I thought, “surely anyone skilled in hypnosis would recognize that I am that kind of person that cannot be hypnotized.”
I avoided making eye contact with him, looking down and to the side toward the other audience members, because I was certain that would show him how defiant and unhypnotizable I was. But then I saw the people in front of me turn around and look back at me when he pointed to his last selection. Damn. He picked me anyway.
I stood and went because I didn’t really want the attention and awkwardness of saying no. As he stood before me I worried about what would happen. I was prepared to have to fake it since I was certain I wouldn’t be able to go under even if I tried to, and because he seemed nice and I didn’t want him to be embarrassed. He looked me over and smiled in a way that gave me the feeling that he must have seen something he liked. He told me (and the audience) that I was a sensitive, and an excellent candidate for hypnosis—I got the sense that he had changed his plans merely because of that fact. He said that mine would be a deeper trance than normal and that he would be able to show things that would otherwise not be possible.
He put his hands on the sides of my head, and though he covered my ears, my hearing was sharp and crystal clear as I heard him say the words that made me feel disconnected from myself. (I also remember how it felt—it was the same rush of heat and energy through my neck, the same burning, that I felt during my “panic attack”, and it was accompanied by the same sense of losing control, but somehow not as scary as usual). I felt my awareness of my body go fuzzy and sink low until there was a dull, heavy feeling about it as if every part of me had simultaneously “gone to sleep” as a foot might when sitting in one position for too long. However, I was still curiously aware of where all of my body parts were, even though I couldn’t feel them and was completely blind— in total darkness with only a vague notion of what was going on around me. I could still hear him clearly—in fact, very clearly, speaking about what he would do with me.
He started with the simple. I could feel him raise one of my arms as a demonstration to the audience, but then I stopped working to pay attention to my arms when I was satisfied he wasn’t doing anything dangerous with them. I got the sense that there was a lot more going on than I thought there was. But it didn't matter, because I was more interested in his presence in my mind. He was hypnotizing. More than his words were, he was. I could sense his eyes and could almost see them. I got the feeling that he was with me inside my head. I was content with that, really, but then I heard him mention a tight rope and my attention came sharply back to what he was having me do. I am terrified of heights and have terrible balance. He was quick to reassure when he felt me reach for control of my legs.
“We won’t use a very high one, she’s already done a good deal in this trance. I would not want her to fall out of it into a more literal fall.”
That struck me as a humble thing to say to an audience and a sign of a very responsible magician, even though in some part of me I knew that I had no way to know that he was telling the truth… and that he was saying it mostly to keep me from fighting the trance and breaking out of it.
I wasn’t aware of anything else that happened while I was in the trance. There may have been a tightrope walk, there may not have been. Time seemed to run fast and skip ahead; either that or I had no concept of time at all. The next thing I was aware of, outside the darkness, was the aftermath when I was suddenly released from the trance. I remember waking up on stage into brightness and confusing amounts of noise from the audience. I was standing in a different place then when I had gone under and holding a bowl of fruit. Then I was quickly shuttled back stage by his assistants where I found a note from him saying, in not so many words, that we should perform together and that at the very least, if I had questions I should stick around in the backstage area until after the show so he could answer them.
I waited for him. Excited about the prospects of being part of the show and full of questions to ask…but mostly just wanting to see him again, in fact, that was the main reason I was excited. I would have gladly volunteered to be part of a whole slew of performances so long as it meant having more contact with him. My consent was implicit in that and whether or not to say yes hardly seemed a matter worth considering. It almost felt like there was some relationship that had been established. I wanted to know more about it, and more about him.
But I never got that chance.
The dream slipped before the show ended and I found myself somewhere else doing something totally unrelated. I was in a fancy parking garage, looking for a place to park and fixing a cell phone cover. When I suddenly realized that something was different, that the proverbial rug had been pulled out from under me, my sense of disappointment was so strong it jolted me into lucidity. I realized the theater was now completely unreachable, and that the memories of what had happened there were more important than trying to find it again. Even against the normal sirens’ call of what can be done with total lucidity in a dream, I merely used it to wake myself up so I could write down the earlier part.
This was not a normal dream. For one thing, the memories of my dreams are not usually so distinct and clear upon waking. For another, the last part of it, where I became aware of going back into the normal dreamscape and got jolted into lucidity by the stark contrast, confirms that there was indeed something different about what I had experienced in the first part.
I’d say I don’t know what it means, but I’d be lying. As I’m writing this, knowing what questions I have been asking in divination lately, I start to wonder if that wasn’t part of the point: perhaps the show hasn’t ended yet. I might still be standing backstage. In any case, I have a suspicion of who that magician might be, and if I’m right…
..then at least I know where to go to ask my questions.
*eyes the smaller shrine in the shrine room, which is cloaked in a curtain of black and red and with white accents*
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