The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness

[Kartik Subbarao]

Jeff Warren takes a tour of various states of consciousness (from both research and experiential perspectives) -- including hypnagogic, lucid dreaming, and meditative states. The writing style is humorous and lightweight, while covering lots of ground.

 

The book:

http://www.amazon.com/Head-Trip-Adventures-Wheel-Consciousness/dp/1...

 

Talks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqv-N0uzVFQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhZ4yo1vfwA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGxbGaBz_iU

 

Here is an excerpt that I found especially insightful. For me, the dream state is one of those compelling reminders that the subject/object boundary of the ordinary waking state isn't set in stone. That my mind, at some level (gross/subtle/causal/whatever :-) ), actually determines how that line gets drawn.

 

Excerpt:

 

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A word here on Tore Nielsen’s notion of covert REM. I agree with Nielsen’s hunch that the dream world can influence waking, but I don’t think there is anything covert or specialized about it. The reason REM brain activity looks so much like waking brain activity is because it is waking brain activity—high activation waking brain activity with the sensory input gates slammed shut. As Stephen LaBerge told me, “we dream because the brain is designed to make a model of the world whenever it’s functioning.”

Since the model is always there, in a sense we are always dreaming. So we see a subtle kind of dream when we look around, a world colored by expectations and personal history. This is the top-down interpretive part of perception: the cruel hostile curl of a stranger’s lip, the menacing bear-shaped form in the forest that makes your heart leap even though on closer inspection we see it is just a tree stump. In waking, sensory input floods consciousness and the dream is pushed back to the edges. We have an external reality within which to conduct our fact-checking.

But the dream model is just a flicker away. It begins to press in on us as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we nod our heads. It too is on a continuum, so at the shallowest we experience mostly thoughts and ideas, but as we get more absorbed—in a daydream, or a hypnotic trance—then Mavromatis’s stages begin to kick in. Images of people and places complement the narrative, and finally the shift to fully-immersive dramas, so that at some point we are no longer just thinking of some scene, but actually moving inside one. The external world has been shut out; we are dreaming. It is the opposite progression of coming out of a dream, where, though we may try to hold onto the narrative and will ourselves back into the action, eventually we are no longer in the scene, but just thinking of it. The bottom-up sensory input stream is now dominant. The dream is in the memory; in some respects, the dream is always in the memory.

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[Balder]

This sounds like quite a fun book, Kartik.  Thanks for the heads up.  I will check it out.