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Excerpt from The Head Trip, this bit below comes after a long riff about how different artists and scientists and thinkers have used the hypnagogic state at sleep onset for creative problem solving.

The hypnagogic is the ultimate paradigm-busting tool. As your brain slips into an associative, impressionistic state, it is no longer bound by conventional wisdom. Saucy ideas – impossible within a certain rational framework – clamour for attention. Images become metaphors for concepts, and suddenly everyone is a poet. The thing to realize here is it’s not just associations of degree, but associations of kind. So in addition to making new factual and ideational links on the “rational” plane, you also get visual images linked to concepts, or mathematical formulas linked to sounds, or physical experiences linked to emotions. This cross-platform synaesthetic mixing is the primeval soup of creative thought, and while something similar may also be happening in regular dreaming, in this case there is a crucial difference: the waking state continues to wield influence in the hypnagogic; thought structures – although loose – maintain a bit of that cause-and-effect robustness. Thus dreamers are able, as another commentator has put it, “to critically evaluate images while they’re still before the eyes.”

I’ve experienced a bizarre phenomenon that seems emblematic of this state. Occasionally as I drift off to sleep I’ll find myself obsessively reviewing some mental image. It is almost always absurd”the cross section of a tennis shoe, for example”but it seems charged with significance. I’ll spend long minutes trying to qualify the shoe according to various bizarre criteria: the number of right angles, possible scientific names, political affiliations, cool handshakes. Then I’ll pass out in defeat. It’s as if as soon as I hit the tunnel of sleep, select mental arrays or structures from waking”like sturdy cargo trains”stay activated, but the freight itself is swapped for some absurd new cargo.

The cargo train metaphor is a useful way to think about associative thinking. Cargo trains can be any kind of mental array or set of relationships: a social hierarchy, some political situation at work, or”as often happens in my case”some type of conceptual taxonomy. So to give a more elaborate example of the latter, let’s say my cargo train is a taxonomy of stone arches. There I am, awake, thinking about my system of stone arch classification”triangular arch, elliptical arch, lancet arch, and so on”all of them lined up in their proper order according to class and architectural style and whatever other technical aspects I have in my head, the whole exercise an almost automatic procedure on the part of the ever-classifying rational mind. Now as soon as that cargo train hits the tunnel of sleep onset, something peculiar happens. The orderly stone arch taxonomy remains, but suddenly the freight”the individual stone arches themselves”gets swapped for something new. So now it’s combinations of wallpaper patterns, or the faces of people I saw on the bus that day, all now arranged in a taxonomy built initially for stone arches. Which leads to absurd thoughts like trying to calculate the weight load of a particular swirl on the wallpaper next to my bed. This is a very literal example; the associative mind seems to substitute whole other classes of elements into these mental arrays. They may be emotions”feelings you have for some person, for example, now structured by stone arch style”or they may be random bits of sensory input”the smell of citrus, say, or the balled-up texture of sweater lint. Something to keep in mind the next time you find yourself obsessively classifying sweater lint as you drift off to sleep. You are not alone!

Providing you can find a worthier subject than the tennis shoe, all of this suggests that the hypnagogic is perfect for problem solving. The question is: how do you retrieve solutions when you are charging into sleep, the notorious memory-obliterator?

One answer can be found with the kingpin of problem-solvers, Thomas Edison. Edison’s mechanical mastery appeared to extend to his own body. He claimed to need very little in the way of sleep, but he was a champion napper, a state that in its first 20 minutes is almost pure hypnagogia. When Edison was stumped on a problem he would find a comfortable chair and settle into one of his naps. On the table in front of him he would place a pad of paper. In each hand he would grip a steel bearing, and on both sides of the chair he would deposit a tin plate. He would then sit back in his chair, dangle each hand over its respective plate, and doze off to sleep. As he began to drowse, one or both of the bearings would fall out of his hands and hit the tin plates, waking Edison with a start. And it was in that period of half-wake, half-sleep that many new ideas came to him. The falling bearing was the associative mind, racing away with the insoluble problem. The tin plate was the leash of waking consciousness. With a clank it would yank back unexpected connections for Edison to inspect and duly document in his notepad.

Salvador Dali apparently used a version of the same technique to prepare for his own creative exertions. He called it “slumber with a key”:

In order to make use of the slumber with a key you must seat yourself in a bony armchair, preferably of Spanish style, with your head tilted back and resting on the stretched leather back. Your two hands must hang beyond the arms of the chair”¦Your wrists must be held out in space and must have been previously lubricated with oil of aspic”¦In this posture, you must hold a heavy key which you will keep suspended, delicately pressed between the extremities of thumb and forefinger of your left hand. Under the key you will previously have placed a plate upside down on the floor. Having made these preparations, you will have merely to let yourself be progressively invaded by a serene afternoon sleep, like the spiritual drop of anisette of your soul rising in the cube of sugar of your body. The moment the key drops from your fingers, you may be sure that the noise of its fall on the upside-down plate will awaken you”¦

Finally, after some practice, I have developed my own personal technique. Although it has yet to revolutionize organic chemistry, or send Parisian art critics shrieking from the gallery, it is nevertheless a reliable way to come up with unexpected insights and associations. It can be used for naps or at night before going to bed. I begin by writing about my target subject, obsessively mulling over connections and meanings. You need to really prime those neural networks, get them (and you) all fired up. After half an hour or so of this I’ll lie down, try to empty my mind, and set the alarm for 20 minutes. Inevitably, as I start to drift away ideas begin to pop around me like soap bubbles. They’re always one track removed from my main preoccupation, like mental echoes from an adjoining dimension. I scribble the most interesting ones in a notebook, though there is always the danger that I will fall asleep first, and like a drowning swimmer drag the new ideas down with me to hopeless irretrievable depths. This is where the alarm comes in; it helps bring ideas back, though you have to document them quickly before they float off. The whole technique seems to work better if I’m in a good mood or am excited about the subject. If I’m bored or feeling indifferent, then the bubbles do not pop. They sputter and fizz and then they beep because that’s the alarm and the nap is over.

Of course, for every real insight there are dozens of lemons”this isn’t magic, it’s still your fallible human brain operating. I also had the idea of serializing The Head Trip as a comic, and for a tantalizing few minutes was absolutely convinced that the She-Hulk would make a great allegorical protagonist. My favourite story of bad dream ideas is an unnamed poet who wakes with what he imagines is a sublime verse. He scribbles it down and returns to sleep. When he wakes the next morning, he turns to look at the words, “which he doubted not would make his name immortal:”

Walker with one eye,
Walker with two,
Something to live for,
And nothing to do.

High drama in Head Trip chapter one: I spend time in a Montreal Sleep Lab falling asleep. The tension for the reader is obviously unbearable: what will Jeff’s sleep onset experiences reveal about the true character of the hypnagogic? 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? Most people can’t bear the dramatic tension. Tears streaming down their face, they flip helplessly to the end of the chapter, where all is revealed, and – with a little sigh of release – their egos melt into a puddle of maple syrup.

The mysterious psychologist Andreas Mavromatis – another obsessive classifier – spent a lot of time trying to work out the exact progression of hypnagogic experiences. I’ve taken his findings and re-expressed them in this fig, the very first I drew for The Head Trip. Hypnagogia: the Everyman’s Trip.

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. Each state of consciousness is like a place you can visit, a country with its own language and customs. So I ran with the metaphor. Here is one of 12 stamps. Ch-thunk, “next please.”

I love this drawing, with its explicit message that eight hours of “monophasic” or consolidated sleep – what we call a “good night’s sleep” in the West and consider a universal norm – is in fact only one option among many in the human (and cetacean) kingdom. Like the brain, real sleep is plastic – you can stretch it out, chop it up – it’s like silly putty. This figure appears in Head Trip’s Watch chapter, which is all about chronobiology and the secret history of segmented sleep. I write about 3 weeks spent in a remote cabin in the woods on an all-natural light program. My sleep patterns got all wiggy and – perfectly balanced between waking and dreaming – I was overcome by a violent tide of collective dream mythology, which lifted me up above the bed and then hurled me backwards through time and space like a 70s B-movie actor in a wind turbine. Then I ate a sandwich, and a single tear rolled down my cheek. I thought: ”˜oh Aslan, thee were’t such a goodly kitty.’

Courtesy of the pioneering psychologist Stephen LaBerge, this is arguably one of the greatest scientific figs ever assembled by Humanity. OK, maybe more like the weirdest. The full story is detailed in chapter 3 of my book, The Head Trip.

To summarize: the fig describes a real lucid dream captured on EEG and EOG in a sleep laboratory. It is one of the first examples of real-time communication between two domains of consciousness. The clean proscribed up and down lines are where the person inside the lucid dream is signalling to researchers standing next to their sleeping body. I think in the next century, the scientific “discovery” and subsequent validation of lucid dreaming will be considered one of the great unheralded discoveries of our age. Why?

How about the doubling of existence? We live in two realities: waking and dreaming. And yet we’re only capable of noticing one. This is because most of the time in dreams we’re on automatic, plus various memory processes are muted. This combination makes dreams powerfully forgettable. But it turns out you can learn to wake up in a dream with all your waking faculties intact: reason, memory, intentionality. They’re all there, booted up and ready to serve you, Dream Warrior, dream hairdo blowing in the dream wind like you’re in a Vidal Sassoon shampoo commercial. Look how magnificent you are! But I have become distracted.

When you wake up in a dream with all these rational waking faculties – well, what happens is your understanding of reality immediately, and forever, explodes. That’s because you find you’re not in some washed out memory of a dream – you are moving in real time through a completely real-seeming virtual universe, paralyzed with shock, heart pounding in your chest, repeating to yourself

“holyshitholyshitholyshitIcan’tbelievethisishappening.”

Yes – it’s that mind-blowing so wake up and look for yourself. People ask me what lucid dreaming is like. Stop reading and look up from your computer – look around the room, at the walls, through the window. Touch the seat of your chair, feel the texture of the rug on the floor. That’s what lucid dreaming is like. It’s like waking reality. Period.

At least it seems that way at first. But soon you begin to notice differences. As you begin to explore – again, this real place, with people and cars and shit – you begin to realize there are a set of universal experiential laws in this domain that are akin to the laws of physics in waking. And yet no one even knows they exist, including 99% of sleep scientists.

This is the second time your mind gets blown. Because I’m not talking about some wimpy post-wakeup dream interpretation – the so-called “rules” of dreaming you get from reading dream symbol books or even from talking to a smart dream therapist. Most of these aren’t universal, they’re personal. But universal laws do exists. These have to do with the dream’s operating system, the structural rules that govern the movement of your dream body and why things get unstable and how expectations shape the scenes you find yourself in and on and on – real laws amenable to empirical investigation and peer-to-peer validation that anyone can take part in – that is, if they take the time to learn how to become lucid. Because you have to be lucid to really participate. Otherwise you’re only looking at dreams after the fact – which is a little like trying to learn about India by watching a TV program about it. Go to India! Smell the incense, buy a local dinner, get diarrhea. Everything else is hearsay.

Why is this important? Because it’s a whole other part of reality. The opportunity to conduct rational experiments in lucid dreaming has only just arrived – only the mystics made any use of it in the past, and we’re scared of mystics on account of how they threaten our worldview. But now scientists can – and a few actually are – get in on the action. Using agreed-upon patterns of eye-signals, people like the psychologist Stephen LaBerge pass messages back and forth from dreaming to waking – again, in real time. Him and his fellow investigators make reports. Their dream hairdos look awesome. They conduct experiments and publish them in peer-reviewed journals. Where are all the other scientists? The place should be packed with nerds and their dream slide-rules. Instead the whole subject is written off as a flaky epiphenomenon.

Who knows what we’ll find down there if we take the time to look carefully, mindfully, without assumptions. The boring unimaginative view of dreaming considers dreams solely the domain of you – you may be able to learn things about your own psychology, but that’s it. WRONG. You can learn plenty about your psychology, but you can also learn about the physics of mind more generally – this is mind in a pure culture, without sensory input to dilute everything. And then there is also the possibility that you can learn something about the external world too, which is distorted and reflected back into the dream in ways we’ve hardly begun to appreciate. Who knows what we’ll uncover as we plumb the transition zone between the internal and the external.

This is a new story, the beginning, in fact, of a new category. Dispatch the galleons!

Click HERE for a comic I made about this new adventure in the making. I also wrote a short article about this here.

Use this handy chart to hypnotize your friends!

Actually, it won’t help with that at all. But it might help with figuring out which of your friends is hypnotizable, should you wish to bring them (finally) under your total control.

Here’s a hypnosis script you can use, straight from the father and son hypnosis team of Spiegel and Spiegel, authors of the American Psychiatric Association’s classic Trance and Treatment.

“Now look toward me. As you hold your head in that position, look up toward your eyebrows”now, toward the top of your head. As you continue to look upward, close your eyes slowly. That’s right . . . close. Close. Close. Close.”

The key is rolling the eyeballs up, as the lids go down. The amount of sclera (white) is apparently a good indicator of innate hypnotic capacity. So if your friend’s eyes go all zombie, then hypnotize them immediately and ask for money.

If their eyes don’t budge, they’re probably a boring skeptic with a rigid uncompromising worldview, which makes me wonder why they are indulging your nerdy hypnosis fetish in the first place.

According to Spiegel and Spiegel, a person’s innate hypnotic capacity reveals certain things about their personality type.

So in the Spiegel model, people who are easily hypnotized are flaky artist actor types, “Dionysians.” On the other extreme you get uptight controlled “Apollonians.” And in between – where most people fall – are the agonized “Odysseans,” fluctuating between tendencies, trapped between “action and despair.”

None of which will make a lick of sense of you don’t check my book, but what the hell, I’m ranting here for free. Now go check your eyeballs!

Start at the bottom.

And you thought meditators we’re just closing their eyes. These are the deep trippers of the animal kingdom, they go way down (or up, depending on your metaphor). But the going is tricky – beware the snakes! Then again, meditators consider even snakes to be opportunities – as the saying goes, “if you meet the Buddha, slay him.” Here I’ve taken thousands of years of hard-won wisdom and completely trivialized it in the form of a simplistic board game. No need to thank me, I’ll get my reward in the next life.

Robert Forman is a former professor of religion, and the author of some excellent articles in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I think of him as a kind of mystical action figure. He transitioned into nondual consciousness a few years ago, neural tubes “unzipping” along the back of his neck with a long tearing sound, in his memorable description. It’s fascinating to think about how the various mystical states all relate to one another. Forman sees it as a progression outward. I tried to capture this sense in my comic panel. PCE = Pure Conscious Experience. DMS = Dual Mystical State. UMS = Unitary Mystical state.
If you really want to understand how all this deep mystical phenomenology goes down, check out Shinzen Young’s Science of Enlightenment talks. Shinzen is basically The Man. He is a genius synthesizer of perennial Buddhist truths, with a blow-by-blow description of the elements of experience that will challenge everything you think you know about mind, development and reality. He gets it from his master, Sasaki Roshi, who roosts up on Mt Baldy, expanding and contracting, the grand cosmic eagle of impermanence.

For people of a particular disposition (nerds), mapping consciousness is a popular pastime; lots of psychologists and at least one neurologist have tried it out. It’s sort of the ultimate reduction, an attempt to jam that great, unquantifiable diffusion of consciousness into a nice, neat box. Yet for all their obvious limitations, such maps can be useful tools, because they force you to think about how all these different states of consciousness relate to one another.

Here is mine. It appears at the end of The Head Trip, originally spread over two facing pages. Unlike other maps of consciousness, its focus is the shifting experience of consciousness, that is, what dimensions best describe the way different states of consciousness feel? Below the fig you can read a long-winded explanation, which – if you are one percent of the population (ie, you’re a 40-year old male virgin into D and D), you will find thrilling – but if you are the other 99% (what’s it like?), you will want to jam a fork in your eye. Fortunately, this being the internet, you can always click away.

As always, the map is not the territory, but hopefully the map will get you thinking about the territory in new ways.

I realize the map – and the following description – may not make sense unless you’ve read The Head Trip; I include them both solely in the interest of expanding global consciousness using obscure hermeneutic systems of classification that no one will understand (we all have our own role to play).

So, the first thing to note is the fold that separates the two pages and the two sides of the diagram. This is the sensory dividing line between waking, on the left-hand side”where the mind is immersed in a model of the world built from sensory input”and sleeping, on the right-hand side”where the mind is immersed in a model of the world built from memory. These worlds get more vivid the farther out you move from the dividing line, which is why slow-wave sleep is tucked in close and REM sleep is way out at the edge.

As we’ve seen, the dividing line between waking and sleeping can be more than a little ambiguous, which is why I have labeled those areas closest to the center Dissociation Zones. So on the left inner side are waking states of consciousness that are tweaked by sleep or dreaming processes (trance, sleep paralysis); on the right inner side are sleeping states of consciousness that are tweaked by waking processes (sleepwalking, REM Behavioral Disorder). The hypnagogic and hypnopompic states are at the edge of their respective Dissociation Zones, with the former moving into sleep and the latter into waking. Although the Watch does skip back and forth into dreams, I characterize that state as more of a waking phenomenon, and thus it’s located on the left side of the spread.

The vertical axis refers to level of brain activation or energy in the system. Even when we’re slumbering peacefully, the brain is highly activated in REM sleep, which is why REM is at the top. Similarly, even though we may be sleepwalking through the neighbor’s backyard and thus our bodies are aroused, our brains are not”we’re actually deep in slow-wave sleep, and thus sleepwalking is at the bottom of the activation axis. A general principle to keep in mind is that the intensity of conscious experience depends a lot on activation; in fact, the former may be a function of the latter. There is also a link here to general arousal. And as we saw in the trance and meditation chapters, the more aroused we are, the greater our capacity for absorption, which is our next axis.

Absorption refers to how immersed we are in whatever we are experiencing, a kind of unself-conscious doing, as opposed to its opposite, the hyper-conscious mindfulness. Examples of the former are the prototypical REM dream and the absorbed end of the Zone, where we hurtle along on automatic, responding to changing conditions without a lot of rumination. At the other end of the scale is the alert clarity of both the lucid dream and the SMR, both of which I classify as species of mindfulness. These are flexible states in which attention can be directed out at the world (or, in the case of lucid dreaming, out at a memory model of the world) or inside to our own thought processes.

The horizontal axis, which does not extend into the two Dissociation Zones, requires a bit of explaining. It refers to orientation toward or focus on the external, on the one hand, or the internal, on the other. This is easy enough in waking: external focus is external focus (on the daffodils, the butterflies, our hairdos in the mirror), while internal focus happens when we’re daydreaming or lost in thought. The focus in sleeping is trickier, and not all internal, as one might suppose. Yes, it’s all happening in our minds, but it still makes sense to distinguish between two poles of orientation. In a normal REM dream we are externally focused in the sense that we are paying attention to the dream imagery and rushing along responding to new situations that, from the point of view of the dreamer, seem real. The opposite pole is slow-wave sleep, in which sleepers report fewer vivid dreams and more repetitive mentation. No fireworks here; the waking equivalent would be sitting on the sub¬way thinking about your laundry.

Finally, though I have a hard time showing it with my clumsy boxes, both sides of the map are supposed to taper at the high back-end because there are certain very deep states of absorption that can be reached only with relatively high brain activation. Here things get even more wildly speculative. At the very back, it no longer makes sense to even talk about the presence or absence of sensory input. Once you get into the meditative jhanas, both external and internal stimuli apparently fall away, and you get deeper and deeper into your own mind until finally you arrive at that big spooky sphere in the center: the Pure Conscious Event, or PCE. Here there is no content whatsoever, not even, paradoxically, your inquiring mind itself. (see footnote 1 at bottom)

So what do we notice then, about this map? The most important thing is that the sensory divide acts as a mirror, and each state of sleeping consciousness has its waking twin. This, for me, was a completely unexpected finding, one that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been suggested elsewhere, though it does fit more generally into Stephen LaBerge’s and neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas’s idea that dreaming and waking are equivalent states. By plotting all these states on a single map, I found no nighttime state that did not have a daytime equivalent and vice-versa; in their range of potential states, consciousness at night and consciousness during the day are almost identical (slow wave caveat to come). The primary nighttime difference is that changes of state are more rigidly demarcated, and the ballooning of memory fragments in a world without constraining sensory input (along with the activation of unconscious schemas and expectations) means we tend to forget the larger context in dreaming, and thus skip more credulously from moment to moment.

To get back to the map, then, one way to think of the slow wave is as a sleep version of the daydream”low activation, deep absorption, and internal focus. This hints at something else quite radical: on some level”barring a coma”we may always be conscious. Not “conscious” meaning aware of the external world, obviously, but “conscious” meaning mental content of some kind is skittering through our heads. This could be the wildest point in the entire book, buried in the Epilogue, but there you have it. Now, a note on the slow wave: the real experts of internal witnessing”the long-term meditators”report the slow wave is a state of “intense bliss,” like nothing else we experience. Add this to the conventional wisdom that during many slow wave wake-ups people have nothing whatsoever to report, and you end up with a pretty superficial resemblance to daydreaming. To really plot this state properly, I would need to blow right out of the 3D paradigm and lay down some mad fourth dimensional bliss/void axis. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a lot of sleep lab evidence points to some kind of mentation going on. It may be exactly like those times we zone out when we’re driving on the highway”we’re simply lost in low-intensity thought, oblivious to the outside world. This is hard enough to remember in waking, let alone in deep sleep, when we have to rise up four fathoms to make our report.

The typical REM dream, with its high activation, external focus, and deep absorption, I have paired with the more automatic side of the athlete’s Zone. In both states we are moving and responding to external “events”; self-consciousness is an interruption. The lucid dream is paired with the SMR or waking mindfulness; in a lucid dream, we’re able to pull away from the dream, to get some perspective and thus be less absorbed. In both states we can choose to pay attention to “external” events, or to our own internal thoughts”something I experienced firsthand with the NovaDreamer when I spent most of the dream sitting in a sturdy model of my bedroom wondering how this whole insane scenario was even possible. I should also say here that although in the text I have occasionally taken Alan Hobson’s lead and characterized lucid dreaming as a type of dissociation, I don’t actually think this is the most useful way to conceive of it. Certainly the man who has studied the phenomenon most, Stephen LaBerge, doesn’t think of it as a dissociation. LaBerge argues that lucid dreaming is simply a kind of mindful awareness”a very evolved and mature species of awareness”that we are capable of tapping into anytime. As we saw with the SMR, this can be every bit as hard to do in waking.

Finally, REM Behavioral Disorder (RBD) and sleep paralysis are like juiced-up versions of waking trance, all of them deeply absorbed and highly activated, but each with a dissociative foot in the other world. (In RBD the foot is literally in the other world in the form of uninhibited movement; with trance and sleep paralysis the otherworldly features are muscle paralysis and dream imagery or some other kind of dissociation.) Though low on the activation scale, sleepwalking too is a kind of trance”a little like the dull end of the Zone, where you’re moving on autopilot, barely awake, and barely tuned into the external world. So the Zone, then, is kind of over here too”a long, diagonal oblong running all the way through the daydream to low trance.

This taxonomic sloppiness highlights another important aspect of the map: it falls apart when you really examine it, because there is so much overlap every¬where. These balloons aren’t so much rigidly demarcated states of consciousness as they are extreme tendencies of consciousness. The reason there is no regular waking consciousness on this map is because there is no such thing as regular waking consciousness”consciousness is literally all over the map. Waking consciousness is constantly in flux. It’s a mixture of alert mindfulness, absorbed action, and distracted rumination, sometimes plunging deep into one of these tendencies, but more often an overlapping combination of all three. This will sound like common sense regarding waking consciousness, but as I have shown here, I believe this is also true of sleeping consciousness, though again, those same tendencies are more rigidly proscribed by cyclical changes happening in the brain (you can’t fake-out the deep, synchronized swells of delta sleep).

If it isn’t obvious already, I consider hypnosis, meditation, and neurofeedback to be induction tools that can all lead more or less to the same places. They are all methods that amplify certain tendencies within consciousness, in particular, our innate capacity for absorption and mindfulness, but also our capacity for dissociations. Each of these tools is capable of pushing at the limits of any one of the dimensions described on the map. Trance and SMR do not “belong” to hypnosis and neurofeedback respectively; they are simply that technique’s name for a state that can be accessed in many different ways. Trance simply means deep focal absorption; in hypnosis, this kind of absorption has been shown to tap into our natural suggestibility. I would guess that deeply absorbed meditation and neurofeedback subjects”whether you describe their journey as following the path of concentration or the path of alpha”are also deeply suggestible, something that would not be difficult to verify. There is also plenty of evidence to show that we don’t even need to be deeply absorbed to be open to suggestion. Hypnosis can also tap into very alert and externally directed states, as I experienced firsthand in Herbert Spiegel’s Manhattan office. Suggestibility may simply be”as Spiegel suggests”a phenomenon independent of noticeable state changes.

The practice of meditation has the greatest range and depth of experience because it has two and a half thousand years of history and hundreds of thousands if not millions of practitioners, many of whom practice the techniques for ten hours a day for their entire lives. There really should be a whole other map for the meditative experience, except of course it can’t really be mapped. The states are so nuanced that they slip through the coarse weave of classification. Still, I hope someone will try.