Accessing the Psychosphere

Updates and Experimenting with Hypnagogic Writing #1

Autumn is Upon Us

Fall has arrived in the Lowcountry. The last couple of days the temperature has dropped, the humidity has subsided, and my yard is covered with a blanket of brown leaves. I got home from work this afternoon and I finished decorating the front of the house for Halloween. It’s far from perfect, I need to pick up more orange and purple lights, a few hanging ghosts, and maybe a giant spider or two, but overall, I’m satisfied with how it looks. Now I’m upstairs with a glass of wine updating you techno-degenerates.

Hypnagogic Writing

In my last transmission, I told you guys about my unconscious drive through the psychosphere and my desire to recreate that experience while writing. Last week I attempted my first experiment with hypnagogic writing.

I got home from work tired. It was Monday and I went to bed late, so I only managed about five hours of sleep, maybe less. On my drive home, my wife sent me a message letting me know that she was going to be out of the house with our kid all afternoon. I finally had my opportunity to experiment.

After changing into comfortable clothes, letting the dog out, feeding the cat, and making sure everything was in place, I sat down at my desk and read through the last piece I was working on. I read it a few times so I could internalize the style and cadence. I set a timer for 35 minutes and lay down for a nap. It took me a few minutes to drift into sleep but I immediately started to dream, or half dream because I was aware of the situation around me. Then the alarm went off and I sat up. Without interruption, I got up sat down at my desk, and started writing.

I wrote nonstop, the words pouring out of me, a complete loss of time and place. Not only that but I changed a large element of the plot, introduced a new character, and solidified a location, problems that have been bothering me for a few days. After what seemed like minutes, I heard the front door open and my wife and kid walking in. Hours passed and I didn’t even notice. It felt like I’d only been writing for minutes.

I came back to what I wrote a few hours later. I liked it, it wasn’t incoherent or poorly written. The first experiment was a success. I managed to induce a hypnagogic flow state by interrupting a nap. The plan is to continue the process, hopefully with increasing productivity and a more efficient transition.

What is she talking about?

I moved on from Twitter months ago. The place irritated me and every discussion spiraled into stupidity. After a while, I realized that the only thing, I got out of it was an unhealthy dose of increased cortisol, the garmonbozia of techno-demonic bile. Unfortunately, one of the boys sent me this screenshot that fucking blew my mind. I’m going to break my do-not-engage with genre writer nonsense because this outlook is rather outstanding.

Katie over here is right. How utterly horrible that so much genre fiction is so erudite, so intellectually taxing. We need to return to lasers and robots and turn our backs on the poetic Faulkarian prose and classical references. One should be able to enjoy a bit of swashbuckling without having to understand allusions to Ovid or Dante. Maybe we should finally retire the endless references to the Old Testament that are so popular in genre fiction today. Not to mention popular movies! Does every film have to be a mix of Tarkovsky and Lynch, can we get something for the masses?

What? Katie, what fucking planet do you live on I want to visit. What world do you live in where the problem with modern literature and culture is complexity and style?

We live in a world where our literature, especially genre, and popular culture has become dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Compared to the dumbest mass media of the 19th and early 20th century our popular media comes off as being intended for the intellectually challenged. Have you been to a bookstore lately? I went to Barnes & Noble yesterday and it’s more of a toy store than a book store.

Katie, we live in a fucking world where the most challenging work grown women your age have read involves boy wizards at boarding school and vampire werewolf love triangles. We live in a world where grown fucking men spend their time watching cartoon superheroes and their money on idiotic funkopop action figures for their collections. How much more simple and enjoyable should fiction get? Today’s science fiction and fantasy don’t even come close to the unique and insightful work from as recent as the 80s. Today’s garbage is middle-grade compared to the work of Gene Wolfe, Frank Herbert, and Dan Simmons. Most SFF readers have a hard time with Hyperion or Book of the New Sun because they lack the intellectual and literary chops to understand the subtext and rich forest of references in the work due to our dumbed-down education system and our cultural embrace of the quick and easy.

So no, we need the opposite. We need serious difficult work. We need to make the reader fucking work for it, struggle to understand, and once completed depart the experience enlightened and uplifted. The world has enough cape shit, laser swords, robots, and elf nonsense. It doesn’t need your shit.