NOTES ON STYLE

Hypnogogic Prose

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1. Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose is prose imbued with various features of poetry, the stark metre and strange run-on rhythms of poetic and scriptural speech. [READ MORE]

2. Hypnogogic: from the Greek hupnos (sleep) + agogos (leading). Lulling the critical mind, awakening the receptive Heart (cf Song of Songs 5:2). [READ MORE]

3. The mechanism of Scripture: Hyp Prose wedded to the deepest themes. Love, death, love as stronger than death. [READ MORE]

4. The language of the unconscious, the sensibility of extreme and elevated states. Writers must go back to this source, then bring the Word back down from the mountaintop. [READ MORE]

5. Hyp Prose waxes dense but depends upon the brevity of the whole. Short books stripped of modern dilatory techniques. Narrative rendered in linear, old-timey “straight-telling” of the story. [READ MORE]

6. Detailed description reserved for movements of the spirit. Intricate interior action (cf the dense interiority of the Psalms) making profound passion plain. [READ MORE]

7. Hyp Prose works through familiarity: poring over the same chapter, the same verse. Repetition reinforcing the hypnogogic effect. [READ MORE]

8. Hyp Prose should move the spirit, in sensitives towards tears. Scripture as empathy training, New Scripture designed to heighten and democratise this effect. [READ MORE]