johnny cash~I'd still be there~

Cash – The autobiography of Johnny Cash

Johnny Horton was into autosuggestion, …, and he'd use it to hypnotize me. He'd tell me that I was going to relax so completely that I couldn't raise my right hand, and when I was into it he'd say, 'Now you're so relaxed you can't even move. You can't even raise your hands. You absolutely cannot raise your right hand. Try to raise it. You can't.' And I couldn't.

I was perfectly alert, quite aware of what was going on around me - this wasn't deep- trance stuff - but there was nothing I could do to raise my own hand. Once I was in that state, Johnny would start opening up my memory to me.

 That's how I was able to complete the writing of 'I'd Still Be There,' the song I heard Webb Pierce singing in a dream. I'd written some of it down as soon as I awoke, but I hadn't been able to remember the whole thing, and I told Johnny that.

He hypnotized me, then said, 'Okay, get out your pencil and paper now. We're going into your mind, back into that dream.' I went there, listened to Webb sing the lines I was missing, wrote it all down as fast as I could, and had the song. It was pretty good, one of the forty or fifty you hear for every really great one that comes along: good enough to record, but not the kind of song that stays with people, not one of the titles I hear called out every night I take the stage. It sounded so much more like a Webb Pierce song than a Johnny Cash song that I was afraid Webb would cover me on it, but he didn't. It just sat there on the 'B' side of 'Ring of Fire' and began to be forgotten (or was never heard in the first place).