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I’m talking about Danny.
    ‘I want you to answer me truthfully,’ he said to us, but it was clear that the performance was for the sake of the gathered crowd. ‘It’s very important that the answers you give are absolutely honest. Can you do that?’
    We sort of nodded and mumbled, unsure as to what Danny wanted.
    ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Have I prepared any of you for this moment? Have I coached you or in any way influenced you?’
    Shakes of heads and muttered ‘no’s.
    ‘OK. Thank you.’
    He turned to the audience.
    ‘Now, what I’m going to attempt today is no less than the hypnosis of our subjects here.’ The statement caused a small buzz of excitement among the crowd. ‘While I haven’t had the time to put our courageous volunteers into a deep hypnotic trance, I am going to try to relax them to the point where they can carry out a few . . . er . . . tasks for me, just to show that they are indeed in a suggestible state.’
    He smiled, suddenly seeming miles away from the gawky, socially useless kid I’d lived next door to all my life.
    ‘Give me a couple of minutes, can you?’ he asked the audience, then spun on his heel, came back to where we were sitting, and squatted in front of us.
    ‘I want you to relax.’ His voice was quiet, mellow, soothing. ‘I want you to close your eyes and study the darkness you find there.’
    OK
, I thought,
I’ll play along.
    I closed my eyes.
    ‘Concentrate on my voice,’ Danny said. ‘Let it be your guide. You must not open your eyes until I tell you. If you understand me, nod your heads now.’
    I nodded. Already my head felt heavy. It stayed nodded down.
    ‘Good.’ Danny’s voice was even more soothing. ‘There is so much weight inside your heads, too many thoughts. We need to let go of them. I want you to imagine that the darkness you are seeing now is the screen of a television set. All dark. Dark. Dark and empty.
    ‘Now, imagine a ball of light in the centre of the screen.It’s bright.
Too
bright. It’s a circle of light that is really, really bright at its centre, but gets hazy towards the edges.
See
the ball of light.
See
the hazy edges.
See
the darkness that surrounds it. Imagine it precisely, and hold it in your mind. You
must
see it. You must see it clearly. You
can
see it. I know you can.’
    As he spoke, the image he wanted me to see settled into my mind. I saw it in perfect detail, could even see the hazy edges, and it
was
too bright.
    Uncomfortably so.
    ‘Now
concentrate.
Concentrate and let your body relax. Let your fingers relax, one by one. Notice that when you relax those fingers, the ball of light becomes dimmer. You are turning down the light, just by relaxing your fingers. Relax them some more. Turn the brightness down some more.’
    I let my fingers relax. The light lost some of its brightness.
    ‘Now I want you to start to relax your hands, let them become weightless. Watch the light dimming as you do it. Feel the relaxation spread to your arms, making them weightless. The light dims some more. It’s all hazy now,that light, and as you relax it gets hazier. Let your body relax, let your mind become soothed by the light as it fades, relax your arms, your shoulders, your neck. Let your mind grow as dark as the screen, as the light fades, as your body relaxes. Let go of all the thoughts that are weighing you down.’
    I felt my mind do just that, letting go of all the baggage, all the chatter.
    As the light faded out into perfect darkness I realised that Danny’s voice was fading out with it.
    It didn’t seem odd, in fact I welcomed the darkness.
    Soon there was nothing else.
    Just darkness.
    And peace.
    NOTE
    The Parker experiment attempted to test Daniel Birnie’s method of hypnosis using the exact words transcribed here. It was a total failure. Either Kyle Straker’s memory or Birnie’s method was flawed.
    Peace, perfect peace.
    I’d never realised that my head was so darned noisy, that thoughts and images and sounds are