Kopfreise


An entertaining book that I've had on my bedside table for the past week or two is The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren.

Using the stages of sleep as chapter headings, Warren talks about hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, REM sleep, lucid dreaming, etc. with a upbeat tone, and he throws in a number of interesting bits of trivia along the way that I often find myself mentioning to my wife or coworkers the next day.

I'm only about halfway through the book, since I'm practically falling asleep every time I read it, but one thought that stuck in my mind from last night's reading is that for all intents and purposes we are basically dreaming all the time. All the time. At night we dream without any sensory input, while during the day we dream with the benefit of sensory input. Everything we consider reality is basically a dream that our minds construct with what's available to it. Since the waking mind has access to a lot more input, it's closer to reality, and sticks closer to the data, unlike a dream which flies off on tangents without any data to jibe with. There's such a Buddhist feel to that idea. " ...I can see two tiny pictures of myself, and there's one in each of your eyes... and they're doing everything I do...It's driving me crazy, it's driving me nuts." (Excepting my friends Greg and Kevin, I don't know who else is gonna get that reference. Good times.) The book is full of little nuggets like that. Little koans of weirdness to think about during the day.

The author visits a number of researchers and takes part in their studies, and he even goes off on his own up to the backwoods of Canada to get a feel for the natural cycle of human sleep, that is, before artificial light took over the night. Which brings up another interesting idea, a stage that Warren calls "the watch", that period of semi-alertness, half-way through the whole sleep period, when you're awake, but somewhat blissful, lying there in the dark.

If you're at all interested in the subjects of sleep, dreaming, or consciousness, I recommend this book.

Posted: Fri - December 28, 2007 at 04:39 PM      

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