Fainting was a brief but common practice amongst 7 year olds in 1979. The would-be fainter and his assistant would stand by the playground wall. The fainter would breathe deeply in and out as fast as he could, whipping up a nice dizzy spell of hyperventilation. After 20 deep breaths, he forces out his final emormous gob of air, and just as he does so the assistant lunged and pressed his chest against the wall as hard as he could. God knows how it works, but the fainter will immediately conk out and collapse, usually falling slightly unconscious and no doubt nearly dying in the process. I've no doubt Michael Hutchence did something similar on his final night alive, only he got his cock out first.

Inducing a fake faint was also known as 'Harvey Walbangers'. Everyone who's done one will generally insist that they nearly died that time, really.

One of the side effects of this singularly stupid activity was that you would often hallucinate as you came "back to life". Juzza, aka The Terminator, admitted that he had hallucinated about playing computer games.
The best hallucination I could manage was a sort of swirling lino-cut impression of the local church, which, while quite psychadelic, was definitely very uncool.
One boy refused to take part, as he felt that abusing yourself to amuse others amounted to prostitution.

When the 'fainter' hit the deck, it was considered fair play that they received a good kicking while they were down.
Well you had to be sure they were OK.

when we got a bit older in school, this changed to involve the breathing in part to be a lung full of ganja smoke. This resulted in several people being taken to hospital during dinner breaks until a particularly scary visit from the local bobby.

yeah man, we used to do it loads until myron askwith fell off the back of his chair and cut his head open when the catcher walked off early. used to feel high when coming round. steve white was out for 17 seconds once. worryingly.

This was a practice swiftly banned in our school, after an ambulance was called for Jamie. We would recount this incident regularly in an effort to put his moronity down to severe brain damage. He was, of course, simply a twat.

In a similar vein I faked a faint once to fool my parents. Home sick from school one day they had to pop out for ten minutes to collect something and left me alone in the house. Upon their return they found me sprawled at the foot of the stairs and before I could wow them all with my amazing trick Mum had panicked and called the local GP out. Terrified now at the consequences I carried on the ruse to the perplexed Doctor. I told my parents that this had in fact all been pretend some fifteen years later. I was still slapped for it.

Holding your breath and pushing, kind of like when clipping off a few links, but upwards rather than downwards, makes your face go an alarming shade of puce and your eyeballs start to swell. Eventually you get a crackling noise in your ears which, I am almost completely certain, is your brain cells actually popping.

I don't do this any more.

We used to call these 'wallies' one long boring summer a group of us were experimenting with this time wasting activity. One guy insisted that if you concentrated on one thing whilst being 'wallied' then you would consequently fall into a trance like state and continue to act out the 'soldier, terminator, porn star' fantasy you had envisaged. Everybody quickly fell in line and insisted this was the case. Of course it was balls, I was the only gullible one that didn't realise that they were simply 'pretending' to faint. I didn't even catch on when one guy didn't quite pretend to faint soon enough, passed out and fell straight forward like a poker, smashing his face up. Another guy went into a fit after being wallied, and spent ages afterwards pulling bits of glass and dirt out of his nostrils that had lodged there whilst twitching. Why did we do this?

By the heady days of 1994 the phenomenon was known as 'the rising crush'. It grew and grew in popularity until one night a group of around 8 of us found ourselves at a local park SIMULTANEOUSLY hyperventilating whilst an independent 'non fainter' counted to 30, at which point 8 teenagers would stand up...and all at once collapse into an earie 5 second silence.

The practice ground to a rather tragic and abrupt end one night when we awoke from our breif oxygen starved slumbers to find our mate had fallen dead weight into a concrete fence post about 5 feet away. He was about 5 feet 5 inches at the time, so hit the very bottom of the post at maximum velocity. Messy. After seeing his open head, I have not voluntarily fainted since.