Ah, hypnosis. Controller of minds! Destroyer of dignity! Warper of... reality?
Yes, in the hands of a determined enough writer, it seems a hypnotist's abilities go way further than just affecting human consciousness and plausible behaviors. In fiction, hypnotism can do things like:
- Be a source for Brainwashed and Crazy: normally, Bob is a law-abiding citizen who wouldn't even consider taking stuff that isn't his, but once Alice hypnotizes him and orders him to commit a theft, Bob will do so, no questions asked.
- Make someone an Instant Expert: if Bob is hypnotized by Alice into believing that he is, say, a professional surgeon, it won't matter that it normally takes years of study and practice to learn surgery or that Bob has no medical experience whatsoever; once in trance, he can do everything a real surgeon can, with these skills vanishing just as quickly if the hypnosis is broken.
- Instantly grant (super)powers: Even if Bob is a scrawny, not particular strong individual, under hypnosis he can suddenly lift heavy weights that without the hypnosis are way too heavy for him. Like the above example, these powers vanish instantly once the hypnosis is broken, which can lead to quite a problem if the hypnosis is broken at the worst possible moment.
- Alter someone's biology: if Alice pulls the classic Chicken Hypnosis Gag on Bob, not only will Bob start acting like a chicken, but now he can suddenly lay eggs like one as well.
- Allow people to defy the laws of physics: If Bob is hypnotized into believing he is a bird, he won't limit himself to simply pretending he can fly with Airplane Arms, but somehow becomes capable of actual flight.
- Mental Time Travel, Astral Projection and what not.
- Affect things that don't even have a mind, such as rocks and trees, or things that run on artificial intelligence, like robots.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. After all, it's not like the average reader is gonna look into hypnosis as a serious branch of science, anyway - who's gonna complain if we "hypnotize" a plot trinket out of thin air? Everyone knows Your Mind Makes It Real, anyhow.
Due to the inherently open-ended nature of this, please try to name only examples explicitly called hypnosis.
Can be justified if the hypnotist has other Combo Platter Powers that could explain the results.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Battle Angel Alita: One of the enemies the heroes have to face off against in the Tournament Arc of Last Order is an intergalactic circus, and one of the fighters is a young woman who has been hypnotized to believe she is a sword, which (through sheer suggestive power) makes her capable of withstanding Sechs' BFS and slice clean through stone. It backfires hard when Sechs uses his ability to change his voice to order her to think she is a flan with the voice of the hypnotist, and again through sheer power of suggestion she melts.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Rohan Kishibe from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable can use Heaven's Door to transmogrify people into books, which he can read and, more importantly, write instructions into people akin to hypnosis. While it first begins with reasonable compulsions like "I cannot attack Rohan", or "I will do this action", later on it goes into straight-up physics manipulation when, in a bind, Rohan commands an ally to "fly out of a room at a higher speed than this enemy", causing them to be lifted and hurled with no visible cause.
- Weather Report from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, who normally has Weather Manipulation powers, later unlocks Heavy Weather — the ability to manipulate light refractions to create subliminal imagery that makes people think they're snails and then subsequently transform into one. Even for a series with the word "bizarre" in its title, Heavy Weather's absurdity stretched suspension of disbelief to the breaking point, with Hirohiko Araki's excuse for this being "perhaps there are weather phenomena we've yet to discover".
- Lupin III: Mad Scientist Dr. Franken (Woolseyised as F. N. Stein in the Tokyopop translation) can somehow hypnotize dead bodies into doing his bidding - even severed limbs and heads. When he doesn't feel like walking, he simply attaches some "hypnotized" legs to the chair he's sitting on.
- One Piece: Jango's hypnosis teeters on this, especially when it spontaneously gives Captain Kuro's Mooks several pounds of muscle mass (one of them even shatters a cliffside with one punch). But it's played even straighter with Miss Goldenweek's ultimate Color Trap, a rainbow swirl that somehow changes all her fellow Baroque Workers' clothes to reflect their innermost dreams.
Comedy
- Discussed in a sketch of Italian comedy trio Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo, together with the Gialappa's Band (who is offscreen and act as a mixture of Only Sane Man and Deadpan Snarker), in which Giovanni, playing Dr. Helmut Alzheimer, after telling the Gialappa's Band that he wants to use hypnosis to make his patients feel no pain so that they can be operated without anesthesia (pain relief from hypnosis has scientific bases, but not to this extent), he says that he has an even better idea: Using hypnosis to make his patients believe they are great medical doctors (implying that they acquire the necessary competence through hypnosis) so that they can self-operate.
- In one Monty Python sketch, a TV host is interviewing interesting people (though most of them are actually normal people with odd quirks). One of these "interesting people" is a man who can allegedly hypnotize bricks and make them fall asleep. He does this by staring at the brick for a few seconds and grinning and telling everyone "it's asleep".
Comic Books
- Batman: An especially out-there example is the Golden/Silver Age character Carter Nichols, a scientist whose "hypnosis" could somehow let Batman and Robin Time Travel — into Ancient Grome, the "Arabian Nights" Days, what have you. It's real time-travel, too; one of these adventures has them conferring with Jules Verne on the blueprints of a superweapon being used in the modern day.
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In one story, Donald volunteers for a stage hypnotist, convinced that he can't be hypnotized, which is soon proven false. Unfortunately, the demonstration goes south when Donald wanders into Duckburg while still in a trance, which makes him susceptible to any suggestion he picks up and causes him to immediately start acting like the person or profession suggested, with any abilities that go with it. Among other things, he becomes a police officer and starts directing traffic, a firefighter who successfully performs a Heroic Fire Rescue, and Tarzan, which allows him to walk across small rooftops with a grace and expertise he usually never has. The entire time his nephews and the hypnotist trail him, trying to undo the hypnosis, which is tricky as breaking the hypnosis at the wrong moment would cause Donald to instantly lose the skills of the person he currently thinks he is, which could lead to a serious accident.
- Suske en Wiske: An early supporting character in the stories "De Tartaarse Helm" and "De Schat van Beersel" is a hypnotist named Priem, whose hypnotic abilities allow him to mentally send people back in time in a mix of Mental Time Travel and Dreaming of Times Gone By (which he does to Suske, Wiske, and Lambik in both stories), or allow a hypnotised person to become weightless and levitate (which he uses to incapacitate a criminal until another villain forces him at gunpoint to undo the hypnotism).
- Wonder Woman (1942): During The Golden Age of Comic Books, Dr. Psycho's powers hinge on hypnotizing women — not to control them per se, but to extract Ectoplasm he uses for disguises.
Eastern Animation
- KikoRiki: In "Forget Everything", Wally, wanting to overcome his fear of heights, is hypnotized by Carlin into "living the high life". The result not only allows him to overcome acrophobia, but drastically changes him into a self-confident, acrobatic, and extremely intelligent person. The drawback is that hypnosis also made him brash and full of himself, causing some of his friends to turn against him, since this isn't the Wally they know.
Films — Animation
- Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie: When George and Harold use the 3-D Hypno Ring on Principal Krupp for the first time, it shoots out spiraling rays of light, causes everything in the room to start floating, and summons a mysterious maelstrom of energy over the school building. After this, like in the book, the hypnosis successfully transforms Principal Krupp into Captain Underpants.
- Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur: Shaggy, under the influence of hypnosis to try and make him braver, ends up capable of mopping the floor with a biker gang. He also challenges the leader to a race, and even saves the guy from falling to his death because, as Shaggy puts it, "You're not getting off that easily." Later in the film, Daphne accidentally un-hypnotizes Shaggy while they're in a dangerous spot and relying on him. Fred points out to him that hypnosis can't make you do things you aren't already able to do, and Shaggy manages another Action Hero-style feat to save the day.
- The Smurfs and the Magic Flute: When Johan and Peewit need to visit the Smurfs, but learn the journey to the Smurfs' land is long and perilous while the heroes are short on time, Homnibus the wizard offers them a shortcut through Hypnokinesis. He puts them both in a hypnotic sleep, which separates their minds from their bodies and sends them instantly to their destination, where they materialize in new physical forms. The process is reversed when Homnibus wakes up Johan and Peewit's original bodies, which stayed with him in his house the whole time.
- The Twelve Tasks of Asterix: One of the twelve tasks involves an Egyptian hypnotist who specializes in hypnotizing people into thinking they are animals. While Asterix and Obelix wait their turn, the hypnotist hypnotizes a man into believing he's a bird, and somehow this allows the man to actually fly like a bird.
Films — Live-Action
- Carnival Magic: In one scene, Markov calls a scrawny nerd from the audience to join him on stage, and asks him to bend a steel bar with his bare hands. As expected, he fails to bend the bar at all. Then Markov hypnotizes him into an alternate persona, "Gus", who suddenly can bend the steel bar with ease.
- The Court Jester: Fearing her mistress, Princess Gwendolyn, will kill her, Lady-in-waiting Griselda hypnotizes Hubert Hawkins into becoming a fearless, unparalleled badass who can woo women, laugh off danger, and fence against Basil Rathbone one-handed using sword-fighting skills he never learned or demonstrated before. The trigger is a snap, which Hawkins actually manages to use against himself on at least one occasion, snapping at his opponent to show how quickly he could end him, only to end up breaking the trance at the worst moment. Fortunately, his foe, unaware of the hypnosis, repeats the snap when mocking the hero, restoring his badass abilities.
- Get Out (2017): Missy is a therapist who uses hypnotism to trigger Chris at will into being thrown into a kind of Psychological Torment Zone that she calls "the sunken place". He's completely paralyzed, unable to speak, and from that moment forward, he can be thrown into the "sunken place" and immediately hypnotized if Missy just taps her cup.
- I Was a Teenage Werewolf: The titular lycanthropy comes about as a result of hypnotic regression bringing out a past life in the form of a wild animal.
- The She-Creature: Carlo Lombardi supposedly hypnotizes his assistant Andrea into recalling her past incarnations. It, however, gets a little silly when one of those incarnations turns out to be some sort of still living prehistoric Fish Lady monster that he commands to stalk and murder people.
- Somewhere in Time: Richard Collier's Mental Time Travel power is explicitly mentioned to be the result of self-hypnotism.
- The Undead (1957): In this case, hypnotism provides Mental Time Travel that leads to Diana interfering in the timeline by mentally encouraging her ancestor Helene to escape her imminent execution, and gets sillier when Quintus apparently self-hypnotizes himself into physically turning up in ye olde medieval times (albeit butt naked, requiring him to mug a knight for his outfit).
Literature
- Arc of a Scythe: In the first book, "Scythe," Scythe Curie introduces Citra to Scythe Hideyoshi during Harvest Conclave. Scythe Hideyoshi is the only known scythe to have mastered gleaning via hypnosis.
- Captain Underpants: George and Harold get a "3-D Hypno Ring" from a mail-order catalog and use it on Principal Krupp. Not only are they able to convince him to wreck his office by acting like various animals, but also get him to fully believe he's the fictional superhero Captain Underpants, complete with all of the Flying Brick powers of the fictional Captain Underpants that George and Harold invented for one of their comic books. They snap him out of it by pouring water on him, but this has the unintended side effect of always making him switch back into Captain Underpants anytime someone snaps their finger.
- The titular heroine of Molly Moon can use hypnotism to read minds and even time travel by hypnotizing objects instead of people.
- Nine Horrors and a Dream: In "Levitation", a carnival hypnotist puts a man under his spell and commands him to "Rise!" The man does so, levitating off the ground. Unfortunately, the hypnotist suffers a sudden fatal heart attack, and thus cannot order the man to stop rising. The man continues up into the sky until he's out of sight.
- The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar: The mesmerist manages to keep Valdemar, who is terminally with pthisis (tuberculosis) in an undead state seven months after his death. When he is woken from his trance, he quickly decays into "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome - of detestable putrescence".
- Averted in The Stand; when Tom Cullen is told under hypnosis to kill anyone who sees or follows him (if they're alone) during his spy mission, a cloud comes over his face, and someone watching the hypnosis mentions that people under hypnosis can't be made to do what they normally wouldn't do in a non-hypnotized state.
Live-Action TV
- Batman (1966): In "The Impractical Joker"/"The Joker's Provokers", the Joker invents a gadget that can freeze and reverse time — which Batman and Robin "explain" as a progression of his previous career as a hypnotist.note
- Gotham reimagines Jervis Tetch/the Mad Hatter from a scientist who uses mind control devices to a hypnotist who uses hypnotism to make people do things like commit murder, kill themselves, believe they are someone else entirely, or perform stunts they never did before.
- Leverage:
- Nate uses hypnosis to "clear away the cobwebs" so that Hardison will remember his youthful skill with a violin, making him capable of confidently playing the Stradivarius belonging to the Big Bad of the week. As Nate points out, the skill was there, it just needed to be brought to the surface. Hardison, however, is less than amused by the manipulation.
- Inverted in another episode. Nate is taken away by two thugs, and when the team get to him, both the thugs are unconscious, and Nate is heavily implied to have hypnotised them into knocking each other out.
- MythBusters actually tested different uses of this trope:
- In one episode, they tried to see if one could use hypnosis to make someone go against their will or do things they normally never would. It didn't work; all test subjects did not respond to the hypnotic triggers supposedly implanted in them, or even began to resist the hypnosis attempt once the hypnotist tried to implant such a trigger.
- In the same episode, they tested to see if hypnosis can help recall details more clearly. It does.
- In another episode, they tried out self-hypnosis tapes. Adam used one to cure him of his fear of bees, Grant to cure him of his seasickness, and Kari to change her eye color. None of them worked.
- Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased): In "When did You Start to Stop Seeing Things?", Jeff has been kidnapped by a gang involved with a corporate espionage and murder scheme, and Marty struggles with what to do as only Jeff is able to see and hear him. However, as Marty discovers, people under hypnosis can hear him. In the climax, when a therapist puts himself in a trance, Marty hypnotises him to believe he's a secret agent and directs him to the gang's location; thus, despite being a scrawny middle-aged academic, he is suddenly able to throw around the goons like they were nothing.
- Small Wonder: In "Look into My Eyes", after the family watches a stage hypnotist's act on TV, Vicki tries it out on everyone she encounters. When the family is gathered for an important visitor and Vicki repeats the stage hypnotist's Trigger Phrase, utter chaos ensues.
- What We Do in the Shadows (2019): In "The Casino", the vampires need money fast, so they bet on a boxing match and hypnotize both combatants to make sure the match plays out exactly like they bet it would. The hypnosis makes the planned winner so strong he knocks his opponent's head off his body when going for the win.
Podcasts
- Sibylline Sounds: Hypnosis can change your species or even turn you into a clone of somebody.
Video Games
- At one point in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Mario is put out of commission by a bout of serious illness and Luigi is left by himself to find a rare herb that will heal him. Luigi being who he is, he seeks help from a Magikoopa who hypnotizes him into thinking he is Mario, thereby having all the courage he needs to fly solo for a while.
Western Animation
- The Casagrandes: In "What's Love Gato Do with It?", when Bobby is hypnotised into thinking he's a cat, this actually makes him able to cough up hairballs.
- Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: In "Parental Discretion Retired", Fat Cat hypnotizes a group of sturgeons into thinking they are chickens, so that just like chickens they lay eggs every day instead of just once a year. This allows Fat Cat to mass-produce caviar and corner the market.
- Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines: Zilly, one of the main characters, is a coward, which makes him a huge wuss and he will even try to desert a mission out of fear. So in "Zilly's a Dilly", Dick Dastardly decides to hire a doctor to hypnotize him into becoming brave. The result is Zilly becoming completely unafraid and more fixated on the missions than anyone else - too much in fact, having become so eager and aggressive that it's to the squadron's detriment.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: "Look into My Eds" has the Eds use a hypnotizing pinwheel to hypnotize kids around the cul-de-sac. The pinwheel can make people act like what the user wants them to be without specifying it (Eddy makes Kevin act like a monkey by saying he will become what he always wanted him to be, while Sarah is hypnotized into being a frog without any actual command) and give the hypnotized people new abilities (Sarah gains the prehensile tongue of a frog, Jimmy gains actual muscle, Rolf starts flying like a bat, etc), with Edd even lampshading it as "Advanced hypno-morphing". When Eddy tries to hypnotize Johnny, he only succeeds in hypnotizing Plank instead (though Johnny does get hypnotized later).
- Fantômette (2000): In episode #5, the bumbling inspector is kidnapped by a false taxi driver and brainwashed by an underling of the Villain with Good Publicity. The brainwashed/hypnotized inspector resurfaces during a museum inauguration, only dressed as a Gentleman Thief, and is actually more brave and more daring than his normal persona. It turns out that his brainwashed persona is modelled after his favourite hero, a fictional gentleman thief.
- Looney Tunes:
- In the Bugs Bunny cartoon "The Hare-Brained Hypnotist", Elmer plans to use hypnosis on Bugs. He first practices on a bear, making him think he's a canary... and lo and behold, the bear flies away twittering like a bird. At the end, after Bugs hypnotized Elmer into acting like a rabbit and back to normal, Bugs laughs at the idea of him being hypnotized, but then he flies away, saying he's the B-19 bomber.
- In "The Mouse-merized Cat", Babbit and Catstello (mouse versions of Abbott and Costello) plan to get past the cat guarding the cheese with hypnosis. Babbit uses hypnosis on Catstello and makes him think he's a chicken. To Babbit's surprise, it works too well, as Catstello somehow lays an egg.
- Ovide and the Gang: In "The Island Games", Ovide decides to organize a local version of the Olympic Games. Cy plots to obtain all the gold medals, but neither he nor his sidekick Bobo is in good enough shape to do so on their own merits. Then Cy sees a TV advertisement from a hypnotist who shows that through hypnotism he can make people do usually impossible things, such as lifting heavy weights. Cy buys the hypnotist's book and successfully uses hypnotism to instantly turn Bobo into a super athlete who dominates all the sports. That is until Ovide catches on to the scheme when he sees the same advertisement, and snaps Bobo out of the hypnosis in the middle of a race.
- Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: The Ghost Clown in "Bedlam in the Big Top" hypnotizes people into performing various circus acts that they never performed before and that usually would take a lot of practice to master.
- Velma: The first season finale reveals that the killer, Victoria Jones, is a skilled hypnotist who was able to hypnotize both Diya Dinkley and William Jones into being accomplices against their will, and was also able to use it to hypnotize Velma into having her nightmarish hallucinations every time she tries to investigate her mother's disappearance. Yet despite how super-humanly powerful the hypnosis is, it turns out it can be undone by a simple finger snap.
- Woody Woodpecker: In "Hypnotic Hick", Woody uses hypnosis on Buzz Buzzard in order to deliver a court summons. After Woody gets Buzz to the officer who hired him, he gets served with a summons of his own for practicing hypnosis out of season. As revenge, Woody hypnotizes Buzz into being a hungry giant, and Buzz grows; then he hypnotizes the officer into being a ham sandwich, and the officer actually becomes a ham sandwich, which is then chased by the giant Buzz.
