It's a rather well-known concept, but I'll give a quick overview of what hypnotism is. Hypnosis is the act of a performer (the "hypnotist") who puts a subject, or a group of spectators, into a state of a trance, apparently allowing the performer to control the subject to do anything he likes. Common acts involve the subject eating an onion (thinking it's an apple), the hot seat (a subject suddenly feels that a chair is burning hot), and others.
Hypnotism is a craft. The performer molds his act around what the audience likes, and maximize their enjoyment. This means that much of hypnotizm is based off other people's tried-and-tested acts and performances. The ubiquitous 'finger-snap' has been plagiarised by some ancient hypnotist without credit, and whilst this is unethical, this universally recognized symbol is actually extremely beneficial to hypnotists, which will be discussed in a later episode in the series.
This series is teaching performance hypnotism, commonly known as stage hypnotism. That is, hypnotising for enjoyment and amusement. This includes the 'sleep' inductions and similar. It is important to state this series does not teach hypnotherapy or other uses of hypnotism such as self-help through self-hypnosis. I personally do not ethically agree with these methods, and feel they are mere money-makers for the authors of those tomes, and am in no way inclined to endorse them.
Hypnotism gains a lot of bad press, horror stories are rife of subjects who have entered a coma and all that jazz, but in reality hypnotism is quite safe. More incidents will arise out of crashing your car on the way home from watching a hypnotism show, than any adverse effects that can (rarely) occur from being hypnotized.
Even though hypnotism is relatively safe, I am still adding this disclaimer to cover ALL eventualities, even something as simple as a cut because the chair used was splintered.
The above disclaimer is mainly for the purposes of removing responsibility from myself in cases whereby someone who has a freak accident totally coincidentally in close proximity to reading my article. Even though it has nothing to do with the hypnotism, people would still want to blame me for the accident. That is what the disclaimer allows me to avoid.
In the next article of the series, actual teaching will begin. I'm sorry if some people feel this first one is a bit of a cop-out, but I had to write it. Rest assured, you'll be able to start performing some form of hypnotism by Part 3 of this series.