Mind over matter: Tom DeLuca entrances VCU again

Students walking past the Commons Plaza on Wednesday evening might have been startled by all the commotion. Rest assured it was none other than renowned hypnotist, Tom DeLuca, doing what he does best: meddling with people’s minds.

For the second consecutive year, VCU welcomed back DeLuca for yet another mind-bending, hilarious performance. DeLuca, who has been featured on NBC’s “Dateline” and within the pages of Rolling Stone and People magazine among his other credits, started out the show by selecting several volunteers out of the crowd to join him on his mission to convey the power of the mind.

Once he had all his volunteers on stage, DeLuca told the audience they could throw out their false notions of hypnotism: getting people to bark like dogs or do ridiculous things.

“There’ll be none of that,” DeLuca assured, right before he hypnotized all the volunteers to think they were milking cows.

DeLuca said volunteers put under hypnosis would wake up not remembering anything that had gone on and would feel as if they had gotten a full night’s rest. Despite sounding very convincing, not all the volunteers were so easily swayed, as several of the volunteers were plucked off the stage and sent back into the crowd as the hypnotism wore off. One volunteer that was sent back into the audience just five minutes later, came back looking mesmerized, saying “I don’t remember what happened. I just feel really relaxed.”

Fortunately for DeLuca, after weeding out the hypnotism-reluctant, the group he had left was as willing and whacked out as one could only imagine. Though it was hard to figure out DeLuca’s method, as his back was turned to the crowd for much of his instruction to his group, he managed to convince the volunteers that they were everything from tongue-speaking aliens to enthusiastic fishers to “fun police” to butt-less minions. DeLuca also brought back several of his past favorite acts, including making one of the volunteers believe that an apple that he was about to eat was a breathing, feeling thing.

Although the show’s audience was riddled with skeptics and believers alike, everyone had to admit that one of the show’s ending acts of getting the volunteers to believe that they were “the best dancers in the world” was absolutely hilarious. To get a volunteer to shake her butt in a complete stranger’s face? Now that’s got to be more than merely convincing.