I don't think it's all that weird, if you understand the "power of suggestion" and how the mind works.
I used to think hypnosis was phony, until I witnessed it for myself. A hypnotist did a performance at the college I attended and demonstrated it on several students I was familiar with on campus, out of a room of about 50 or 60 of us. He had the room do a relaxation exercise to determine which students would be best suited for his demonstration. I thought it was bogus, so I didn't fully give in to it.
The students were a mix of people who didn't really associate with each other, which was convincing enough to me that it wasn't entirely staged. None of them were actors (as far as I knew), and they were all doing things in front of the audience, with a straight face, I couldn't imagine them ever doing under ordinary circumstances. I went from being a skeptic to considering hypnosis as a credible thing.
To show that it worked on the entire group, the hypnotist had them believe that they were "dogs", and the students wander around the room barking, some of them on all fours. One of the students I was really familiar with was an exchange student from Africa, and she passed where I was seated and gave me a brief glance while barking. I notice a vacant look in her eyes and I laughed to see if she would come out of character.
Later, after the event, I caught her in the dorms and ask her a bunch of questions about it all, and if she really didn't notice me when she passed me as a "dog", and she told me didn't remember any of it. She was a really cool chick, and I took her to be someone who would tell me if it was actually bogus. After that, I stopped being real skeptical about things I didn't understand, and decided to be more open minded.
Since I was a small child, being an artist, I'd always been fascinated by how mental tricks, the mind and imagination works. I was really cautious about falling for dubious things. Growing up watching a lot of TV, I used to not believe in subliminal messaging in commercials and advertisements, because usually saw right through them, thinking no one with a brain could fall for them.
After college, I got real heavy into things like spirituality, consciousness, and quantum physics, and found there is a logical explanation for a lot of things we commonly don't understand about our reality. The mind is easily indoctrinated, and will accept just about anything, when it is in a regressed or relaxed state. Marketing and advertisement firms know this very well and expend much effort in making it more and more effective; which is more apparent than ever, nowadays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GyyALIAQD0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDsnii7ETNw