Please Explain To Me This Weird Thing That Happened In My Childhood
?????
When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my friends got into this weird thing I can only call hypnosis. One person would close their eyes and lie down, and someone else would tell a long story to them. At the end of the story, there would be some weird psychological effect. There was a story about stuffing palm trees and bowling balls into your head, and when the story was done your head would feel very heavy. There was a story about wrapping string tightly around your arms, and when the story was done you couldn’t lift up your arms. There were other stories, but those are the ones I remember. Discussion with my friends has enabled me to identify Crack An Egg On Your Head and Catscratch as other instances of the genre.
The stories were passed along as childhood lore, in the same way as Miss Mary Mac and Miss Suzy Had A Steamboat.
I know this sounds like a creepypasta, but I swear to God it actually happened. I realize that creepypasta authors also say that but I hope my claim that this really actually happened is more credible because no one died or mysteriously disappeared and also I’m posting on my effective altruism blog instead of r/nosleep.
I have not been able to find any online record of things like this, partially because I have no idea what keywords to search for. (I found some people discussing them under the name “sensory games”, but if you google that you just get people telling you about oobleck.) So I turn to you, O People Of My Blog:
Did anyone else do this as a kid?
Do you know what keywords I can use to find records of it?
How the fuck did that work? Were we all going around hypnotizing each other as ten-year-olds?
This is easy to do with children. I once convinced all three of my children and four of their friends, by speaking to them very quietly and calmly as they lay on the floor with their eyes closed, that I had glued their eyes shut, but that when I clapped my hands they would be able to open them. I let them squirm and exclaim for about 20 seconds and then clapped my hands and all their eyes popped open. They still marvel at it, but I've never tried it again in spite of repeated entreaties from my young grandchildren. Children HAVE to be suggestible, I expect, in order to learn. That's not to say it's an entirely good thing.
I don't recall doing anything of this genre when I was a kid, nor do I know of relevant search keywords. But, based on a read of the two linked pages, at minimum the first one looks very hypnosis-ish? Like, I'm pretty sure *I* could be hypnotized by something like that. The second one I'm not sure what to make of, though, given that it's apparently supposed to produce externally-visible skin-markings rather than just internal experiences; that is Off-Model for me in terms of what hypnosis should be able to do, so if that one works as described then that's indicative of some separate interesting thing going on, I think.