Customer Reviews

Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I came across this book as an undergraduate while studying hypnagogic phenomena in a sleep lab. It is a fairly encyclopedic survey of the many aspects of hypnagogic (sleep onset) and hypnopompic (the time between the end of sleep and first awakening) phenomena. A large section also compares hypnagogic phenomena to dreams, meditation, hypnosis, schizophrenia, creativity, and 'psychic' (psi, here) phenomena, making for some interesting reading. One extra perk is that it is filled with beautiful (black and white) artwork, much of it by the author, depicting various perceptual aspects of hypnagogic imagery/dreaming.

The reader should know though that this is a 'book' essentially in the form of an enormous review paper, attempting to reference pretty much every paper on the subject and translate a number of very difficult-to-access sources from other languages. For this it is very much to be commended, but don't buy this thinking you'll get a fascinating theory of hypnagogic phenomena or a lot of first-person accounts. It is aimed at the serious scholar (of whom there must be very few on this obscure topic) and though it covers an immense amount of ground it tends to do so in a very cursory way. But as a reference tome, it is utterly invaluable and beautifully indexed/referenced/etc.