The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness

This is a remarkable and interesting book about human consciousness. Really - it is much more interesting than it sounds like it would be. This is not a New Age-y manifesto but a amusing trip through sleep and waking life. It is written by a journalist, not a scientist or doctor, and it has a fun, quirky style with a lot of humorous comic book style diagrams. The first, most interesting, half is about sleep. Different stages of sleep and types of dreams. The best parts are the sections about lucid dreaming and the watch. I am a person who strives to achieve lucid dreams and I liked the stories about people who are tremendously successful lucid dreamers, and ways to improve the chances of having lucid dreams. The section on "the watch" changed the way I looked at sleep. Our modern expectation is that we will have an Ambien night - go to bet, konk out, and wake up in the morning remembering nothing of the night while we were asleep. Historically, the author tells s, people fully expected to lie awake for a while in the middle of the night. It turns out that this is, to quote the Talking Heads, a "good place to get some thinking done." This book has actually changed my life, in a sense, because I now no longer dread lying awake for a while in the middle of the night, but see it as a positive thing. Plus, f you no longer fear "the watch" it doesn't last as long. If I'm not afraid of being awake for a while I get back to sleep much more quickly. The second half on waking consciousness, regrettably, was not nearly as interesting. But seriously, I would highly recommend this book to anybody who ever sleeps (or is awake). Ha ha - sleep is a huge part of our lives, but how much do we even know about it?

There has over the past few decades been an increasing interest in something which we all take for granted: consciousness. Just how the inert molecules in the brain manage to make us conscious, or just what consciousness is, or what the different states of consciousness are, hits on huge questions within philosophy and neurology, questions that remain mysterious. To heck with all the mystery; let's just have some fun! That seems to be the attitude of Jeff Warren, a writer and broadcaster who specializes in science themes, in _The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness_ (Random House). Not to be too grandiose: in the illustrations in the book, that's the "Wheel O' Consciousness". Warren sets out to pursue consciousness, not just the waking, sleeping, and dreaming that we all go through (although his nocturnal adventures are among the most interesting), but also hypnosis and meditation and more. He does have fun throughout, and doesn't mind telling us about it in jocular, enthusiastic prose (and his own cartoon illustrations), although anyone who thinks about consciousness for a long time will wind up, well, thinking about it for a long time. There is thus a lot here to chuckle over and to contemplate. Just dreaming is not enough. Warren has to pursue different types of dreaming, like hypnagogic dreams, the ones that last a few minutes just as you are falling into sleep. Warren writes about how to use hypnagogia for problem solving, and it produced the idea of this book, but some of the ideas he had were real lemons ("... this isn't magic, it's still your fallible human brain operating.") In a lucid dream, you know you are dreaming and you can play around in the dream world, pushing it to do what you want. But Warren himself has some difficulty with manipulating a character in a specific dream; conjuring up a dream meeting with a long-ago crush, he scoops her into his arms to find, "It was like kissing a zombie. Her head lolled to the side and her eyes were blank. Man, my characters were terrible, what the hell was wrong with me? I was disgusted with myself. No wonder I wrote nonfiction." Warren goes to investigate "The Watch", a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night that might be the natural pattern of sleeping given to us by our tribal days. He tries hypnosis, he investigates daydreaming (yes, some scientific research has been done on daydreaming), and of course he gets hooked up to a biofeedback (or more specifically neurofeedback) machine. He goes to a seven-day Buddhist meditation retreat, and reports on all the paradoxes he finds in "the experience of no experience". Warren doesn't do drugs. Or at least none of the chapters here is devoted to any sort of illicit experimentation, but during his neurofeedback phase, "One friend remarked that I seemed more relaxed, but that may have been because I was drunk at the time." Almost all the conscious states here are available to anyone, although like Wa

The concepts here may not be new for those who've gone of the way to get experienced with their consciousness, but the level of detail (dig that bibliography!) and attention to recent developments in various fields -- sleep science, neurofeedback, even hypnosis -- is enough to inspire all sorts of new inquiry. For the "layperson," however, or "non-freak," this condenses what it took your average freak ten years of living to explore and confirm on his own. Read it and save yourself the time!

This one was fun; and it really changed the way I think about consciousness. The author is very entertaining, and the style and delivery of the content is unique. The fact that he did all of these things himself (experimentally) added a whole new level to this book's importance. If it had just been a dry documentary, it wouldn't have been the same. I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone who's willing to take a wild journey into themselves, and who isn't afraid to change the way they see the world around them (or dream it!).

Jeff Warren moves through the latest thinking on consciousness, mind, and sleep, with ease and zany wit and humour. Written from the perspective of a culture vulture trying to figure out what's going on inside his own head, he effortlessly synthesizes much of the latest thinking about the brain in fields as diverse as psychology, neuro-biology, immunology and others. Thomas Kuhn, Sigmund Freud, Steven Johnson, and many other great thinkers show up in this bold, adventurous journey through the mind.