Sometimes hours, days or weeks after I have shown some one a trick they will describe it to another person but when they do, they describe it as a much better trick than it is.

For example if I produce and item then vanish it they will say my hands were completely empty both before and after when in reality they weren't or they will say I found or guessed A card they "thought of" and leave out the fact that they wrote the card down, told me the card or picked the card from a deck. This has always amazed me and in fact I abuse that last one when doing stigmata by saying "the card you are thinking of" rather than "the card that you picked"

There are a few other examples on the tip of my tongue that I just can't remember but I am sure some of you have experienced the same thing and I would love to hear some stories.

This kind of goes back to some previous conversations. When you mess up a trick if you have an out they will never know you messed up. They don't know what is supposed to happen. They don't know what they are seeing.

And from the description you gave you can see that they see the tricks very differently. That is part of the reason you will hear people say that some magic tricks are for magicians, some are for laymen. You can do a trick with the hardest card control in it and blow away other magicians, but you can blow the laymen away with the right flourish. We see magic from a different perspective than they do.

If you do a trick then have 10 people write down what they saw (not how they think it was done). I bet you would find at least 10 different answers.

At work last summer I did the Professor's Nightmare. It freaked people out a lot more than I expected! They were blown away. Then I did the Anywhere Card. When my friend went through the deck looking for his card it had vanished, and there only 51 cards in the deck. I'm in short sleeves and my hand are obviously empty. I reach into my sock and pullout his card. I thought I was going to have to cal an ambulance. He and about 4 others totally flipped out. And this is really an easy trick.

I LOVE it when this happens.

I was hanging out with a friend who had seen me do a triple prediction effect on stage. He was describing it to someone else and making it sound WAY more impossible than it actually was. Isn't it great how faulty our memories are?

To increase the likely hood of this happening feel free to LIE to your audience. Ie. Card to wallet. after the spectator has inserted the card back in the deck it takes just a brief second to side steal or DPS. Immediatly hand the deck out to the spectator to shuffle. Before the reveal go through all the gobbledy gook about how they picked the card, how the decided where to replace the card, and how they shuffled the cards. Then add, "Heck I didn't even touch the cards!" It is a flat out lie but to most spectators it is the truth. at least when it seemed to matter(card selection and shuffling) it sure seemed as if it was the truth.