Being tickled with feathers. Drinking copious amounts of wine. Playing the flute to a beautiful woman.

For this writer at least, these sound like the ingredients for an entertaining evening indoors. But if you happen to suffer from either pteronophobia, oenophobia, aulophobia or calyginephobia (or, if particularly unfortunate, all four) this is a vision of unspeakable terror. For these are, respectively, the fears of feather-tickling, wine, flutes and good-looking females.

Fear comes in many shapes and sizes not all of them dark and shadowy as Mill Hill hypnotherapist David Samson can well attest. For the past year he has been conducting a survey into phobias, the irrational fears that can take over our lives.

"Around ten per cent of people you will see walking down the street have a phobia, yet only one per cent of them will do anything about it." said Mr Samson, who works at Avanti Hypnotherapy in Hankins Lane.

"The aim of this survey was to find out what is the most common fear.

"So many people come to see me and say: I think I'm weird, you probably haven't heard of this but...' then once you've spoken to them and found out what they are afraid of you realise they are not that weird at all,"

The results he has collated so far prove fascinating reading.

As perhaps expected, most of us will break into cold sweats at the sight of an insect about the size of a 50 pence piece the humble spider topping the list.

Everything from clowns, to vomiting to, quite strangely, balloons, follow close behind.

So where do these phobias originate? Why can some people see horror where others see happiness? Why could I walk past a bald person without batting an eyelid while a peladophobic would be looking to hide up the nearest tree?

Mr Samson's method of venturing into the core of our fears is regressive hypnotherapy.

He puts his patient under hypnosis and then takes them back to their childhood memories, where he hopes to discover the roots of the problem.

"Imagine as a baby, seeing a spider for the first time. How would you feel? Curious, probably. Then imagine your parents walk in and scream, and splat this spider," said Mr Samson.

"From that point onwards, a file is created in your mind to be afraid of the spider, and the more you practise this fear, the worse it gets.

"By going back through regressive hypnotherapy, by visiting the point where the fear first began, you can see how irrational it is."

He believes this is where my own personal fear the fear of clowns stems from.

Although it is not a phobia in that I will not freeze with fear upon seeing a man with a big red smile painted on his face, the mere mention of Stephen King's It (which concerns an evil clown) can turn me into a big girl's blouse.

"Clowns and masks are a very common fear," explained Mr Samson. "Something might have happened to you at the circus, or a clown might have shocked you at a shopping centre. I don't think clowns are sinister. I think they're funny.

"It's these distressing moments stored in the subconscious that put people on guard."

By the same logic, he believes, we can understand how phobias you and I may consider extremely odd first came to light.

"I once had to deal with a woman who was afraid of the letter V'," he said.

"It first started as a fear of vomiting, of someone being sick on her or being sick herself.

"This then extended to the word vomit' and then, eventually, the sound of the letter V'.

"It's a strong-sounding letter, so that's perhaps why. This was a 37-year-old woman. Under hypnosis, it became clear that someone had been sick on her as a child, and it was a experience that shocked her so badly it had stayed in her subconscious ever since."

Other unusual phobias include a man who had stood on top of the Empire State Building and felt fine, yet when halfway up the Eiffel Tower experienced a full-blown panic attack.

Spiders, clowns, the letter V and bolsheviks. What do they all have in common? Somebody, somewhere, is terrified of them. And a Mill Hill hypnotherapist believes he can help. HUGH CHRISTOPHER finds out more

His problem turned out to be not with heights, but the fear of being pushed.

"As a child he had been sitting on his highchair when he was pushed from the side and fell to ground.

"When he panicked on the Eiffel Tower he was walking up a spiral staircase alongside other people. His fear was that he was to be pushed from the side. At the Empire State Building how- ever he was standing alone with ever he had space around him so had nothing to worry about."

Mr Samson first became interested in the human mind as a casino manager in the early Eighties. He would watch respectable, reasonable and rational professionals catch sight of a roulette wheel or poker table and see them transform into money-crazed morons.

This loss of control fascinated him. He studied psychology to learn more about irrational behaviour, before eventually finding his niche in hypnotherapy and phobias.

He now runs two clinics, one in Mill Hill and the other in central London.

He claims to have a 90 per cent success rate with phobias, whether the fear is familiar (agoraphobia, claustrophobia) or unusual (bolshephobia the fear of bolsheviks). Hypnophobia (the fear of being hypnotised) could prove a problem however.

As for Mr Samson himself, he claims to fear nothing.

"I was afraid of aeroplane turbulence, but as part of my job you have to undergo regular hypnosis yourself so now I have nothing to fear at all," he said.

To contact David Samson phone 0800 634 0512 or log on to www.avantihypnotherapy.com