Illustrations
The comic panel is to the scientific fig what subjective experience is to objective brain science: sloppy expressionist truant vs anal materialist authority. My book, The Head Trip was an attempt to bridge these two worlds.
The Author’s Hypnagogic Wakeup
Where exactly do these hypnagogic images come from, and is there any logic to their appearance? Are they a species of dream, and if so, do they appear suddenly, as fully developed dramas, or do they evolve more gradually, as part of some furtive and mysterious psychic progression? The dramatic tension is almost unbearable.
Mavromatis’ Four Stages of Hypnagogia
The mysterious psychologist Andreas Mavromatis – another obsessive classifier – spent a lot of time trying to work out the exact progression of hypnagogic experiences. Hypnagogia: the Everyman’s Trip.
Hypnagogic Passport stamp
In the interests of readability and accessible, and due to my near-uncontrollable ADD, I have injected Head Trip with every imaginable graphical teaching device. Foremost among these are the “passport stamps,” which end every chapter, and summarize where – in the wide wide mind – the reader-voyager has just been.