By Elizabeth Scalzo
Entertainment Editor
Each semester the Office of Student Life holds welcome week for the campus community to raise school spirit. This semester there were a series of events leading up to a hypnosis show on Thursday, Jan. 23. The show was performed by Mark Zacharia who travels the tri-state area performing hypnosis shows and packed the Knight Club in the Student Union Building with a full audience.
Before the show officially began Zacharia did two tests for the audience to see if they were good candidates for hypnosis. Then he called for volunteers to come up to the stage. After about five minutes of getting the students into a hypnotic state, the real fun began.
The show started off with simple hypnotic commands by waking the volunteers up and having them go back to sleep. The second part of the hypnosis was all reliant on the volunteer’s senses. Zacharia told volunteers to imagine a smell that makes them really happy and reminded them of a good time in their lives. Two participants said chocolate chip cookies and one mentioned fresh laundry as the scent but the most surprising answer was gasoline.
Once the tests were over, the ladies on stage had felt like their chairs were burning. At that point, the hypnosis became more individualized for each person. One volunteer was told to forget her name. Another could only speak her own form of gibberish when she was asked questions. By far the most entertaining was when one of the volunteers believed he was a secret agent when specific music played and he had to hide from the people on stage.
The show was a wonderful time for the audience and full of laughs. One audience member even fell into the trance at one point and had to be taken out by Zacharia. After the show, The Equinox got the chance to talk to one of the volunteers, Zahraa Muhammad, a sophomore humanities major at FDU.
“I did a hypnosis show before at the state fair because I wanted to see if it actually worked and it didn’t for me but one of my teammates suggested I try it again because this guy (Zacharia) is really good,” Muhammad said. “When you’re up there you are aware of what you are doing but you just don’t know why you are doing it.”
When asked if she would volunteer again Muhammad simply replied “Yes.”
The show was a lot of fun for both the parties on stage and those in the audience and it would be great to see more events like this in the future.
Photo by Elizabeth Scalzo
Contests are commanded to sleep by hypnotist, Mark Zacharia.
