The Home & Away Hypnotist

Non-Brits, note that the "Home & Away" to which I refer is an Australian TV soap opera. Mum can't get enough of it.

I had, by the time of this dream, starred in a one-off event TV episode of Home & Away, where the Aussie cast had come up to Wales to enjoy the scenery, and I make an appearance as a rogue hypnotist - a hypnotherapist who got struck off for unethical practices. Bad guy sort. Troublemaker.

Now the thing is, a few weeks down the line, the producer and director had invited me to appear in the soap in Australia, down in the show's setting of "Summer Bay," so I turn up on the show, getting off some bus in nearby Yabby Creek, ask a local where Summer Bay is and enquire if there's transport there.

I next climbed out of a taxi, with my cases, and go and find the house I had bought in cash apparently. I was some sort of a rich louche rogue hypnotist, apparently, who could buy homes like packets of sweets.

The thing was, as a hypnotist for real, I had been told by the producer and director that I should trance the actors for real. They were not to act in any way, and as a matter of fact they all had scripts which led them to believe that I was some sort of harmless, if slightly crap, stage magician who was perfecting a new magic routine. What made my job easier was that half of them had already been thoroughly entranced by me six weeks beforehand and post-hypnotic anchoring triggers implanted in their psyches, and I know for a fact that my triggers can last for more than two years between triggerings (some of my more successful clients have permanent triggers!), so re-trancing them was as easy as commanding them to sleep.

They had literally no clue. Not even when I commanded them in their tranced state to remove their clothes (the cameras panned round so as to show their backs when they denuded themselves) and they obeyed. Me, I enjoyed watching them from the front because you might as well enjoy your handiwork.

I even got the actress who plays a cop in the show to disrobe for me. That was actually fun for the actress as much as it was for me; apparently, the actress had a fetish for being tranced. Some people like having others hypnotise them and instruct them to do erotic things. Who'd have thought?

The alarm went off and woke me, just as the good news came down the line that there was going to be a special live edition of the show coming in a few weeks, and it would be centred around my using hypnosis to build a base of believers and collect a cult of devoted dupes.