Head Trip
Scanning the tweets and status updates of one’s fellow writers, a theme emerges: sleep, or, more to the point, the lack thereof. Also coffee. This may seem like the mundanest of cheese-sandwichery but from the inside this is clearly shop talk of the first order. Creative work is not about waiting for inspiration; it’s about waiting for brain activity.
Jeff Warren’s 2007 book The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness
is by no means billed or framed as a guide to better sleep. Nonetheless I’ve found it enormously helpful in, if not always scoring high-quality slumber, understanding what’s happening when I’m not. The sub-titular wheel of consciousness is the cycle of states each of us goes through over the course of a day, both while sleeping and waking. Accompanied by his charmingly naïve cartoon illustrations, Warren chronicles his pursuit of mental states ranging from the hypnogogic to deep REM sleep, lucid dreaming, and the Watch. This last is thepreternatural period of superconscious sleep we post-industrials have eliminated from our mental routine with our regimented schedules, electric lights, and alarm clocks. Waking states range from the creative “Zone” struggled for by writers and athletes alike, along with hypnosis and meditation. I found the book stronger in its first half, mostly because Warren largely fails in his quests to penetrate the altered states of the daylight hours.
I found the book’s discussion of the 90-minute cycles of rest and alertness that strike us throughout the day invaluable. Now I know what’s going on when 4:30 hits and a wave of brain fog yanks me out of the writing zone.
Also intriguing were Warren’s thoughts on dreams and their relation to our assumptions of narrative. I always figured that our dreams have been imprinted with cinematic devices since movies and TV became an omnipresent part of the modern sensory diet. Warren raises the possibility that dreams have always used these editing devices, leading one to speculate that the power of movies derives from their ability to mimic dream.
If you live in your head, whether as a vocation or hobby, Warren’s book serves as a fascinating travelogue of its outer reaches.