Like a certain number of you, it was indeed the Kaa/Mowgli scene in Disney's version of THE JUNGLE BOOK that planted the seed of fascination with hypnosis into my childhood mind, but I'm not sure whether it would have blossomed into a lifelong interest/hobby/fetish if it hadn;t been nurtured along the way by instances of hypnosis in books I read (or had read to me by my mother) as a child.

I'm not going to discuss (except here) some obvious children's book series that feature hypnosis as a major plot device such as MOLLY MOON and CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS (not to mention mind control magic in HARRY POTTER) simply because they weren't around when I was a kid, though, obviously, feel free to discuss those books if they had an influence on you.

CLEVER POLLY AND THE STUPID WOLF: a British book series containing short stories of a wolf that wants to eat a clever girl named Polly, who would always turn the tables on him. In one chapter, the wolf tries to hypnotize Polly to... I don't remember, sit still and not resist his attempts to devour her, but Polly tricks him into staring at the sun and hypnotizes him to leave her alone, though I presume the hypnotic suggestion wore off as there were more chapters and books.

THE DEMON HEADMASTER: Oh god, this was hypnosis fetish fuel for me as a kid/young teen. A girl is a new student at a school where every single student is hypnotized by the headmaster (principal) to be model students and he tries to hypnotize all of England via a TV show, though the girl, and a handful of kids who are immune to hypnosis thwart him. It's a whole book series, but I only ever read the first book and I never saw the 1990s TV adaptation, but I'm damn sure that was the book that cemented my hypnosis fetish beyond just childhood fantasy. I think there are several hentai games in Japan that deal with a whole school of hypnotized students, I wonder THE DEMON HEADMASTER was an influence?

PICK-A-PATH: These were pretty much the same thing as CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE books, though slimmer and (presumably) meant for slightly younger readers/ I remember several of them had hypnosis scenes, even in stories where hypnosis didn't seem to fit, almost as though one of the authors of the series had a specific interest in hypnosis himself/herself. The one I remember best is DINOSAUR ADVENTURE, where the kid travels back to the dinosaur era with a handheld time machine that looks like a tape recorder. In one of the endings, it turns out that the "time machine" was, in fact, a tape recorder and the whole dinosaur adventure was just a hypnotic fantasy implanted in his mind by a hypnosis tape given to him by a professor. There was another book in the series, I don't remember what it was exactly, but some researchers have kidnapped you for whatever research purpose and they take you to a blue room with a comfortable chair where a voice over the speakers tries to hypnotize you, and the reader is given the choice to either resist the hypnosis (by thinking about SUPERMAN r something) or to let them hypnotize you, and I distinctly remember them describing the experience of being hypnotized as pleasurable and fun, although the story ended there if you picked that option.

There was another book series, and I don't remember what it was but it had something to do with kids/teens solving mysteries and it most definitely wasn't ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN. There was this one story where they were trying to get people to confess to some petty little crime, so they put on a show in the school auditorium with a lot of drumming and they raised the temperature in the room, and, somehow, that worked at hypnotizing everyone and they got the confession they wanted. It seems kind of far-fetched, I think people would either just doze off or walk out of the room instead of falling into a hypnotized state, but I'm not the writer. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Please feel free to discuss anything I've mentioned or anything else that falls under the vaguely-defined category of children's literature with hypnosis scenes.

Your description of "The Demon Headmaster" reminds me of an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? If you're not aware, it was a "horror" show on Nickelodeon in the early to late 90s (I think it also had a comeback at some point?), that was "scary", but not too scary for kids. Each episode was it's own self-contained story.

In one episode, a brother and sister go to a boarding school with really strict and strange rules, like heavy restrictions on music and the fact that they serve this weird slop called "Sponge" in the cafeteria, and it's a rule that you have to eat it - though the protagonists do not.

Eventually, the siblings wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of the monotone bell going off... and all the other students getting up out of their beds and seemingly sleepwalking down into the basement. All of them. Hundreds of students just slowly, dreamily walking around. The siblings try to wake them, but they don't respond.

They're lead to a chamber with a bunch of large eggs in pools of water, and they all start spreading some kind of powder over the eggs. Then the headmaster and other teacher's show up and comment that the kids "have been eating their Sponge" (implying that this food is the method of MC). Then the siblings find out that the teachers are all aliens or monsters or something and the students are being used to feed their eggs.

So then the brother of the two siblings has a bright idea and turns on his radio, since they seem to dislike loud sounds. This causes the aliens/monsters to literally explode, and then all the children wake up.

I remember ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK, I don't remember that specific episode.

On a tangent, anyone know if there was ever a GOOSEBUMPS book about an evil stage hypnotist? I was a little too old for those books even when they were new, but hypnosis with ill intent seems like something the series would've gotten to eventually.

Hmm... I didn't read all the books... but the closest thing I can think of to having any MC are the Haunted Mask books, where the wearer of said mask becomes evil.

I realized that I was into MC when I read THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA book Six, THE SILVER CHAIR. The villain, basically a sexy Mole Person, uses some sort of incense and music to hypnotize our heroes into giving up, and it's only by virtue of the frog-man's peculiar respiratory system that he resists and snaps everyone else out of it.

I think what inspired me was probably the first Pokemon movie, when Nurse Joy was hypnotized by Mewtwo into being his servant.

I was -always- into hypnosis, for as long as I can remember. No particular scene stands out for me.

The Horror at Camp Jellyjam contained some MC, with the hero of the book walking in on a meeting where all the camp counselors were getting brainwashed.

Or something like that, it's been quite some time since I read that one.

One of the Choose Your Own Adventure Goosebumps books also had a scenario where you walked into a room with a giant bladed pendulum and got hypnotized by it before BAD END, but I'll be damned if I can remember which one it was. (Into The Jaws of Doom, perhaps?)

The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, including the movie even.

Yeah, Boris and Natasha used hypnosis occasionally, but that's a TV show, not a book.

However, you bumped my thread back to the front page, so thanks anyhow! :-D