On a dark stage faintly lit by three spotlights in a softly illuminated auditorium, it happened. Fourteen MacArthur students subjected themselves to humiliation, hypnosis, and the fast-talking, spiked-haired college entertainer of the year, Dale K.
On Thursday, September 19 at 8 p.m. in the MAC Auditorium on the Jupiter campus, a large crowd of students watched as 14 of their peers subjected themselves to utter mortification in exchange for the illusion of a few extra hours of sleep and the spirit of a good show.
Dale K. made sure to point out that the activities on stage might be physically strenuous and not meant for those who wanted to “get up on stage to prove to their friends that they couldn’t be hypnotized.” The participants became the stars of the show and their participation and imagination determined the degree of the audience’s entertainment.
He also dispelled the rumors of television hypnotics, stating that are 95% false, and that no lightning bolts would come from his eyes. He promised the volunteers that if they stayed up on the stage the whole time they would feel like they had eight extra hours of sleep the following morning-besides, the only phrase that they had to remember was “release, wide awake.”
Props were kept to a minimum, and the participants had to imagine everything that Dale K. described. Definitely a college oriented show, some of the imaginative highlights included the hypnotized students ducking from Dale K.’s “well hung” genitals, a supersoaker water gun filled with donkey urine, milking a cow and then being milked themselves, x-ray vision, an “orgasma ray,” and a shoe phone.
Student Walker Hicken volunteered and was the “star of the show” for much of the night. He drove a 2003 Ferrari, pretended he was a horny monkey, plugged up holes in a hot air balloon, and was part of the “Outback Boys” strip show along with student Austin Boyle.
Jennifer Williams had a pet hippo, talked to a vacuum salesman on a shoe phone, and got drenched by a super soaker on the way to a big date. Ally Bennett had a pet monkey and had her belt turned into a snake.
“There were times when I felt like I had no control of what I was doing, and there were other times that I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, but there wasn’t any good reason not to do what he said,” said Hicken.
The two-hour show was fast moving and kept the audience laughing. Full of sexual innuendo and crude humor, the spectators left with a smile on their faces. While some of the hypnotized students admitted that they’d faked the whole thing, others really felt that they were “under hypnosis.”
Even those that were skeptical couldn’t truly discern whether or not the participants were faking hypnosis. Although there were skeptics and believers, many of the participants left the auditorium wondering the same thing.
“I just really hope that it feels like I have an extra eight hours of sleep tomorrow,” said student Austin Boyle.