Mind bender

>> The Head Trip explores and contradicts
our notion of a good night’s res

by Juliet Waters

“Mapping consciousness is a popular pastime,” Jeff Warren writes in The Head Trip, “for people of a particular disposition (nerds).” True, but recent interest in the tricky mysteries of human consciousness has grown well beyond the nerd community. Just last month, The New York Times Fashion & Style section included a feature on lucid dreaming to coincide with The Good Night, a movie on the subject directed by Jake Paltrow (brother of Gwyneth). Way before consciousness went Hollywood, Warren was producing CBC radio documentaries for Ideas and The Current, on research in the “inspired fringe” of science.

Frustrated with slippery scientific tomes and some of the more esoteric literature, Warren decided to do his best with an inspired everyman attitude. The Head Trip charts his adventures in Montreal sleep labs, Hawaiian lucid dreaming workshops, Scottish meditation retreats, London and New York hypnotherapy sessions and Toronto neurofeedback labs to name a few of the places he visits.

In the most interesting chapter, Warren describes his own experiments in one rarely studied state of consciousness—sleep as nature intended it. In this chapter, Warren sets out in the middle of winter to a cabin up north to find out what happens when he goes to sleep and wakes up with the sun.

Historical literature suggests that before the invention of artificial light, humans slept eight hours a night, but in two shifts. “First sleep” started around nine or 10 p.m., and ended around midnight. This was followed by an hour or two of quiet contemplation, sex, conversation or dream recall. Then humans went back to sleep for a second shift until dawn. Today, this kind of segmented sleep is called insomnia and is cured with a wide range of sleeping pills. Those few studies that have been done with the hypothesis that this sleep pattern is not only natural, but better, suggest that the brain produces prolactin, a natural sedative, during that contemplative hour between sleep shifts. The body may also produce more melatonin in segmented sleep, an important chemical in cancer prevention.

The Watch, as Warren dubs the waking hour between shifts, is only one of 13 states of consciousness he maps. These include states as intense as vivid lucid dreams, peak meditative experiences and performance “zones,” and states as mundane as daydreams, slow wave sleep and that fuzzy period in between waking and sleeping. In Montreal last week as part of The Head Trip book tour, Warren confirmed my suspicion that The Watch is the chapter that is getting the most interest from readers and interviewers.

“A lot of people wake up in the middle of the night, struggling with insomnia. To hear that it might be a natural pattern as opposed to a pathology is so enormously reassuring. It changes entirely the way you experience the state. But the funny thing about The Watch is that hardly anyone knows about segmented sleep within the sleep research community. It’s a kind of controversial claim. At the same time—it’s pretty incontrovertible, I mean when you look at the historical and scientific knowledge. I feel like, here’s this science journalist talking about The Watch, and most sleep scientists just laugh or roll their eyes. But read the book.”

And do the research. Since I first read The Watch chapter about a week ago, I’ve been giving myself plenty of time to sleep and chill out between bouts of sleeping, and I haven’t felt this awake since…well…ever.

The Head Trip is indeed trippy and inspiring, as well as enlightening. It’s more elegantly written, entertaining and illustrated (with Warren’s own pencil drawings and ruminative doodles) than what one might expect from, let’s say, a Dummies Guide to the Mind. But it’s just as user friendly. Definitely something you’ll want to pack on your own nerdy head-trip.

The Head Trip: Adventures on
The Wheel of Consciousness
by Jeff Warren, Random House,
HC, 391PP, $34.95