Once when you were Pharoah...

"One life leads to another," says hypnotist Irv Mordes and so on and so on

A A A Comments By Eric Alan Barton Thursday, Aug 21 2003

...continued from page 6

Finally, Mordes stops the tape and points to the vinyl recliner on the other side of the room. "Hop in the chair," he tells Stephanie, a middle-aged blond woman. She enters a relaxed state on her own before Mordes plays another tape, a recording of his own voice giving instructions for those he's hypnotizing. He perfected the recording years ago in the sessions with Lee.

"Visualize in your mind's eye an escalator," Mordes says on the tape, his voice sounding much younger, not cracking and a little higher pitched. "See the black railings moving down, down." His voice drones, smooth and relaxing. "Now step off at the bottom very relaxed and comfortable. You are now in a very deep, deep, hypnotic trance."

Eric Alan Barton

Stephanie hopes Irv Mordes will help her drop ten pounds. He hopes she'll buy his book.

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Next comes the commands. He tells her to start eating half her plate at dinner and to skip snacks. He tells her to exercise and quit smoking those borrowed cigarettes when she's been drinking. And most important of all comes the sternest of commands, the one that doesn't always work, that maybe failed him years ago with Lee, and that simply can't make people buy his book.

"You will now accept and follow," Mordes says, "every hypnotic suggestion."