No Actors or Stooges Were Used in this Blog

This blog fuses magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship. I achieve all the prose you read through a varied mixture of those techniques. At no point are actors or stooges used in this blog.

A hypnotist and mentalist brings a woman to an empty room overlooking a street. He takes her to a corner and tells her to turn and walk across the room with her back to him, walk to the far corner without stopping.

He holds up his arm, palm bare and as the woman gets half way, maybe two thirds of the way across the room, he clenches his hand into a fist. The woman, though unable to see the mentalist's hand or shadow, stops cold. The mentalist asks the woman why she stopped; he told her to walk to the corner of the room. The woman doesn't know why she stopped. Come to think of it, she can't even continue. Her feet feel stuck to the floor.

The hypnotist frees the woman from her induced, imaginary bind and explains to her that he will transfer to her his eerie ability to make people inexpliably stop in their tracks at his command. Time passes as the hypnotist places the woman in a trance where he goes to work, doing whatever it is that a hypnotist does during an event like this, after which he brings the woman out of trance and takes her to the window overlooking the street.

He lets the woman choose a person in the street, someone walking away from them so they can't be aware of her. The mentalist instructs the woman to raise her arm, palm bare and whenever she wants to, clench hand into a fist. She chooses a person, raises her hand and, in her own time, chenches her hand into a fist. The person she chose stops cold. She stops cold and after the briefest of moments turns to look toward the window in the building overlooking the street, where the woman is standing with her clenched fist. The woman, shocked, hides behind the curtain. How did she just do that?

You remember being told that no stooges were used. The person in the street couldn't have been a stooge. But how else could that possibly happen. All these tricks work on the basis that the people involved have been influenced by the hypnotist. Is it then fair to assume that the person in the street could have met the hypnotist previously? But since the he was with the woman for easily fifteen or twenty minutes, the person in the street would have to have agreed to walk down the street on queue. Which would make her a stooge. But what if the mentalist had hypnotised her to follow his instructions, but then completely forget that they had both met? So she's following his suggestions, almost to the point of being a stooge, but she's oblivious because she's been hypnotised to forget the mentalist and not think what she's doing. Does that make her an actor or a stooge?

Is this going on, does this count, are hypnotists and mentalists breaking the rules?

Probably not, but it's an interesting thought.