Snap out of it! No, really — snap out of it!
A fledgling hypnotist's demonstration at a Québécois school wound up embarrassing when he proved unable to bring several girls out of a trance — and had to call in reinforcements.
When Maxime Nadeau staged a hypnotism show for a group of 12- and 13-year-olds at girls' school Collège du Sacré-Coeur in Sherbrooke, Que., his subjects should have come out of the trance by the end of the demonstration, the CBC reported.
But some of them didn't.
Nadeau had to call his mentor Richard Whitbread, who rushed over from his home an hour away snap the girls out of it.
Whitbread blamed his protégé's good looks for the eerie snafu. He said the smitten young girls might have been particularly eager to follow his directions.
All told, one of them reportedly remained hypnotized for five hours, according to the CBC.
Nadeau downplayed the significance of the hypnotic limbo in an interview with the Canadian news agency.
"Being in a trance is a state of well-being," he said. "I wasn't stressed. I knew they would get out of it."
"There were a couple of students who had their heads lying on the table and there were [others] who, you could tell, were in trance," he said. "The eyes were open, and there was nobody home."
The show reportedly affected even the girls in the audience.
"I don't know how to explain it. It's like you're no longer there," one student said. "You're spaced out."
