By Kara Thibault, News Correspondent

Northeastern students danced, screamed, laughed and cried on stage last Saturday night, but not by their own accord. These students were under the power of hypnosis as their friends and peers watched.

“I will make your cares, your concerns and your worries disappear,” said veteran hypnotist David Hall as he placed 20 student volunteers into deep trances.

Hall, a Boston local and a comedy hypnotist, performed for about 300 people in Blackman Auditorium on Sept. 8, and entertained the crowd while his subjects followed his every direction.

“I remember being on the left side of the stage, and my head just dropped,” said junior marketing major Harrison Cleaver, who was one of the hypnotized.

Cleaver, like most of the other participants onstage, fell in and out of a deep sleep with the snap of Hall’s fingers. Throughout the show, Cleaver thought he was staring at a naked audience, received a puppy for Christmas, took a trip to the Bahamas, danced for a prize and reacted to other fake scenarios.

At one point in the night, Hall convinced three students that they were no longer Northeastern students, but Beyoncé and her back-up dancers. They managed to put on a cheer-worthy show, as “Single Ladies” played in the background.

Max Falkenberg, a freshman environmental science major, was one of the back-up dancers, though he said couldn’t remember much of his experience.

“It was kind of like a dream. I remember dancing a lot. Someone said I was speaking Portuguese,” he said.

Falkenberg referred to the moment in the show when he was angrily screaming at the crowd in his second language, after Hall informed his volunteers that they no longer spoke English, but rather a space alien language.

After furiously pointing and screaming at a laughing audience, he broke down sobbing in frustration, and was once again put into one of many brief sleeping spells.

Falkenberg was not the only one to become emotional during his trance-like state. After thinking she won a million dollars on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” one student began crying from pure elation as the other hypnotized students ran around hugging each other and jumping around at the news.

All 20 students even thought they were holding their million dollar checks in their hands, until it magically turned into a freezing ice cube, that is.

While a few students left the stage after snapping out of their daze, they were soon replaced by several students in the audience who had accidentally fallen into a state of hypnosis, simply by listening to Hall and following his directions.

After being pulled up onstage, one of the previous spectators was sure that there was a peacock in the audience after being told that the front row of the auditorium was suddenly a petting zoo.

Throughout the 90-minute show, there were few people in Blackman who were not gasping and roaring with laughter at what they were seeing, Cynthia Briceno, a sophomore business major, said.

“I loved it,” she said. “David Hall kept everyone giggling the entire time. Two thumbs up on the show. I would love to see something like that again.”

Tyler Petersen, a sophomore communications major also enjoyed the show. “It was surprisingly entertaining and a lot of fun,” he said. “I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.”

Before snapping everyone onstage out of their dazes, Hall gave the participants their final instructions.

“You are all going to leave feeling refreshed tonight,” Hall told them. “You feel absolutely incredible about all the years to come at Northeastern.”

His final words to the sleeping students was that every time they hear the words “David Hall,” they will throw their fists up in the air and exclaim, “That guy is awesome.”

Soon after participants came out of their trances, audience members rushed to their just-hypnotized friends to fill them in on the crazy stunts they had performed in front of the large crowd.

When asked about his experience and what he thought about Hall, Cleaver had nothing much to say except for, “That guy is awesome.”