I recently visited my sister and her family.

Right at the start of my visit I took a drink of water out of a glass which was standing in front of me.

“ You didn’t drink out of that, did you?” asked my sister. “That glass belongs to Luise, and she’s highly contagious.”

I bent over the glass and spat the following words into it: “Make sure you don’t catch the Stefan disease!”

Then I drank all the water in the glass. And nothing else happened – at any rate not to me.

(Stefan Hammel, Handbook of Therapeutic Storytelling, p. 39-40)