The café was crowded last night and D and I had to wait a bit before getting a small table. M soon joined us and after some post-Holiday-intercession recap, he began our induction of the evening. M used a relatively obscure but apparently very effective Milton Erickson technique on me and D. By merely turning his head, M caused the point of origin of the sound of his voice to shift. Erickson reportedly did this from his wheelchair. M got us mellow with his marvelously resonant voice, just talking, almost rambling. I was staring off into space and noticed D’s eyes close first. Before I closed mine, I noticed M was looking this way and that as he spoke. I remember wondering what was distracting him so much that it kept him periodically turning his head and looking away from us as he spoke. I was sitting beside him, and D sat opposite me. M could have easily aimed his voice between us, or only slightly moved his head to talk to each of us. But the last thing I remember seeing was M’s head swiveling to and fro as he turned to speak towards me and then looked away while his voice droned on. I could barely suppress my grin when I recognized the strategy of changing the orientation of his voice. I imagined him as a lighthouse, his voice was the light beacon, rhythmically sweeping over us as he talked about flames and water. What the heck was he saying? Beats me. Like a lawn sprinkler, his words washed over us and faded in and out in a consistent pattern that lulled us into a really nice trance. Well done!

When we were brought out of trance, C was sitting at the table. He’d stealthily insinuated himself beside D just before we were emerged. Never heard him coming! Soon after, K and K arrived and the conversation got animated again. We got to talking about cold-reading and mentalism and automatic writing. I had wanted to do an abbreviated progressive muscle relaxation induction on M but time slipped by and we were soon saying farewells to M and D.

By the way, if any of my fellow HypnoMeet people read this blog post, I welcome you to add what ever I may have unintentionally deleted, or give further color to your contribution to the events that I try to reconstruct and describe here.