Fed by Birds

Head Trip by Jeff Warren is a fascinating journey into different stages on the daily "wheel" of consciousness. I didn't even know some of these stages were there: I had a vague awareness that the hallucinogenic state you go into just before falling asleep is called hypnagogic, but not about the hypnopompic stage on the way out, where dreams overlap with reality.

Anyone who suffers from insomnia may find consolation in the section on sleep: Warren suggests lying awake in the middle of the night might be natural or even beneficial. In the days when people went to bed with the daylight, they had a first sleep, then all got up for the 'stirring hour' or what Warren calls 'the Watch', chatted, had sex, wandered around or just mulled over their dreams, and went back for a second, different sort of sleep in the early hours. When Warren goes off to a remote hut to try the old pattern, he finds his ideas about sleep transformed: "It was a little like finding out that the home you live in is really the exposed bell tower of a vast underground cathedral."

Of course it's mainly Western industrial societies who've become slaves to the idea of eight hour sleeps - if you're a member of the Gebusi tribe in Papua New Guinea you never fall asleep at all, for fear of becoming the victim of a prank: "A favourite joke on someone who succumbs consists of dressing up in warfare gear, taking up weapons and screaming at the sleeper. If he starts out of sleep in horrified alarm, convinced he's about to be killed in a raid, the joke is viewed as an unqualified success."