The description “Hyp Prose” was only retrofitted to my work once it was substantially complete.
I had given an early copy of From the Chronicles of Lupa to a friend when I went down to the country to stay with her, and I noticed that whenever I picked up the book to flick through it I would be provoked into a profound emotional reaction from simply reading a few words.
Lupa has always been emotional for me, both in the reading and the writing, but this was something else. I decided that I must have become (mildly) hypnotised by it, so that my rational mind could be bypassed and I could be prompted by a tiny fragment into a profound emotional reaction.
Over a few months of reflection I fleshed out that hypothesis. I have always been aware that my books have a scriptural cadence to them, as well as scriptural themes, and that scripture is well known to have this hypnogogic effect on people.
I eventually decided that it was all the same effect: the emotional power of this special kind of rhythmic, repetitive language when it is married to an exploration of the deepest human themes: love, death, love as stronger than death.
Unfortunately my ideas about Hyp Prose remain hypothetical. I have not yet attracted a substantial readership, and certainly not the special kind of readership I would need to test these ideas. As with Scripture, the Hypnogogic effect only happens with deep familiarity with the stories and their conveying language, through poring over the same chapter and verse time and time again.
I do remain confident in these ideas, though, based on my intuition that once you get past the rational mind (to a level that I call the Deep Heart or the Receptive Heart) virtually all human beings are made of the same stuff; so that if I have a profound reaction on that level there will be many other people who have that same reaction.
On the suggestion of an Instagram friend I have included an example of my work to illustrate this aspect of Hyp Prose. All of my books are available to read (free!) on my website if you’d like to find out more 😊
P. Julian
3 March 2018
#hypnogogicprose #hypprose #fromthechroniclesoflupa #scripture#writersofinstagram #writingtips #newgenre
Cynics might observe that Jesse had no claim to such repentance, or any example to follow in the restoration of his own damaged heart. He had been badly betrayed by the people who should have loved him, and there was no obvious influence in his life that could have set his footing so firmly back on the proper path.
But the world is vast, as are the places outside of it, and in the desert places where the strange voices sing perhaps there was some intercession on his behalf. A deep and abiding love that sang strangely to Jesse, from the clear space of these outward places, especially when he would doze, or dream, or come to the verge of sleep.
Sometimes in the dusk, in the night season, this love might float down upon his head, or rise like mist from the ground luminosity that arose unseen, unnoticed about him at these times. In the morning with the dew on the grass, and before the first light of the sun, a sure love that sang to him, that did not falter from its singing.
And if he could discern the words, in those times when he was anointed by them, reading the patterns in the dew and the evening sky, the mist upon the night gardens, Jesse may have heard these words, praising him and calling him to the greatness he was destined for:
Who is this, whose eyes are the Morning Sun
His face as irresistible as the dawn?
Who is it that comes among us
Like the balsam that flows upon the slopes of Gilead?
This strange love song that falls mostly on deaf ears and hearts of stone but which also falls on more fertile fields, like the heart of this Jesse James, hearts that are constructed to be entirely susceptible to it:
He is chief amongst the ten thousand…
And it may have been this love that Jesse learned by, this love that he followed, this song that led him to the places where men are guided so that they may be restored.
And it may be that Jesse multiplied this love within himself, and thus purified his heart, and grew worthier of this love as it reached out ever more strongly to him. Even though the architects of this song could not help but sing to him, as the world has been made.
And if Jesse grew in his many gifts, gifts that might repay sevenfold the strange ones who sang to him, and if he thus accepted the destiny he was born to?
O you who know the truth -