SUMMER OF PSYCHONAUTICS
The Hypnotic World of Paul McKenna – Paul McKenna
Readers: you are no doubt aware that every great hypnotist has, in their origins story, the tale of The Hypnotist who inspired them onto their path towards hypno-greatness.
Derren has Martin S Taylor. Kev and the Head Hacking collective (plus a veritable army of student psychologists lol) have Derren. And the author of today’s book, Paul McKenna, was mentored by Richard Bandler, co-founder of NLP.
But what of MY hypno-origins story, I hear you ask?! Well. Let me introduce you to the man, the legend, The Hypnotist – Lee Fone.
Oh. You haven’t heard of Lee Fone, have you? No. That’s because he’s a 15-year-old boy I went to school with.
It is the summer of 1994. And the market town of Buntingford, Hertfordshire, is teeming with drunk and high children, as was apparently peculiar to my school – Ward Freeman.
Picture it: my best friend and I are busily cultivating Benson & Hedges and boyfriend habits. We alternately swig fizzy pop and the cheapest vodka one can blag from Happy Shopper in a dog-beshitted alleyway. We’re going two’s up, three’s up, four’s up on a spliff in the park whenever the opportunity strikes: this is because smoking marijuana incense sticks failed to yield results and my best friend is not yet handily dating the local drug dealer.
We move in teen-herds from park, to alleyway, to chip shop, to park, to housing estate, to park, to alleyway, to park. One boy two years above us has installed elastic bands in the ankles of his baggy jeans to steal ice creams to order from the lovely old lady who runs the sweet shop*. We shout-sing Under The Bridge on the outskirts of a Bovis Homes development, then lounge obnoxiously on playground equipment. Most importantly, I am ‘going out with’ a boy called Clifford, aged 16, with whom I barely speak but about whom I spend my every waking hour conspiring to engineer into touching my tits.
Yes, these are happy, heady, hedonistic days. And yet ecstasy, speed and acid are not on the curriculum til next year. Plus I’ve drawn the line at huffing glue and Lynx, as is also the vogue, because I think it’s, ugh, just too common. Fortunately, though, there is one more psychonautical adventure on offer this summer, thanks to Lee Fone: hypnosis.
Now, it may not surprise you to learn that my memory is hazy on the particulars… But, basically, Lee rocks up one day with a copy of Paul McKenna’s book in hand… aaand mass-hypnotises a bunch of kids ‘down Bovis’.
Being hypnotised by Lee becomes a much sought-after summer holidays experience. But, sadly, I don’t much know him and so don’t dare ask to be hypnotised myself…
My main memory of this time is of being in my best friend’s bedroom with Lee, Clifford and a bunch of other kids. My best friend’s two chipmunks, Fish and Benedict, are rattling around in their cage whilst Lee wields his hypnotic powers. My best friend is ‘in a trance’ and, much to my awestruck curiosity, Clifford is crouched, stiff and transfixed, ‘fishing’ with an imaginary rod. Others are absorbed in ‘trance’ or similarly quiet, solitary activities.
Neither Cliff nor my friend seem to be pretending. But what I do know from a whole year of me and my younger brother watching The Hypnotic World of Paul McKenna TV show is that hypnosis is potent, serious, sacred stuff. I cannot make sense of the whole affair...
Now, I can’t claim that these hypno-dabblings stayed with me through my teenage years and beyond; they resurfaced a few years ago when I first became interested in hypnosis back in 2016. I asked my friend about it around that time: she says she was just playing along and thought so was everyone else.
But I was not, am not, satisfied with that answer and so I bought a copy of Lee’s (probable) book, The Hypnotic World of Paul McKenna, published in 1993, to discover his secrets.
What I discover instead is that McKenna has written a stonking book about hypnosis, which, as we now know from this blog project, is no mean feat. The introduction is so compelling to me: with its rhetorical question on what the reader may have to contribute to the field of hypnosis in 10 years’ time and hopes that the world becomes a playground for [me], it feels like McKenna is speaking to me through space and time!
When I read hypnosis books for Cosmic Pancakes! I usually type or write notes throughout. But I found myself thoroughly absorbed in this book, even though I don’t necessarily concur with every point.
I appreciated the nuance of McKenna’s explanations in a popular book – for instance, the conscious/unconscious mind model is still couched as a useful model and metaphor rather than ‘scientific truth’. Also, his thoughts on hypnotherapy and NLP are surprisingly palatable given my views on NLP; I particularly liked his ‘driving instructor’ analogy for getting your own shit together before you start meddling with other people’s minds. It feels plausible, compelling and mature.
The book is packed with eclectic references, from academics such as Sarbin, Hilgard and Orne, to Gurdjieff and William Joseph Bryan. I didn’t know McKenna was so well researched, frankly; I’ve been scribbling down books and references, and am forever grateful for learning that Operation ARTICHOKE was a precursor to Project MK-Ultra.
The section on stage hypnosis is a joy: mostly a memoir iced with some history, with some fascinating ‘hypnosis as meme’ nuggets. McKenna particularly shifted the fashion away from tawdry end-of-the-pier entertainment hypnosis to his ‘classier’ stage, TV and therapy stuff – it’s all very Hello and daytime-TV-celeb-friendly.
I end the book intrigued as to what kind of psychonaut McKenna is, given all the references and reality-shaking suggestions… I momentarily met McKenna at an NLP thing and tried to ask him about Robert Anton Wilson, who is an inspiration for this blog (here and here). He barely managed to say “he was a lovely man” before he got grappled into a selfie with two women. Here’s hoping we can ask him that question properly sometime soon.
I know what you’re thinking, though: none of this seems like the sort of stuff a 15-year-old boy would engage with! Indeed. Let’s not underestimate Lee, but there is no simple, step-by-step, ‘wow-your-friends’ guide to hypnosis. I cannot imagine a 16-year-old pacing and leading and breathing and rapporting and giving three flying fucks about trance.
In the opening pages, McKenna includes past-life regression and the reclamation of long-forgotten memories among the feats hypnosis can achieve. I scoffed. But 60-something pages in, I had a weirdly vivid memory of Lee, wielding his book… and being challenged to hypnotise someone… and then picking up a stick that had fallen from a tree…
All or most of us were watching McKenna’s TV show at that time; the main impression it made on me was that the process of hypnotising someone was a secret too, too terrible to be broadcast. Given that McKenna doesn’t provide a step-by-step process here, this begs the question: did Lee hypnotise my schoolmates with simply the aid of a book and a stick?! Now, that’s worth investigating further…
*I’m so sorry.
[Update 23.11.23 – If you’d like to experience some ‘second-hand magic’ that happened when I reconnected with Lee to okay the original draft post, watch Magic Medicine on Netflix here.]
