Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose Manifesto
Plain Text Version for AI Accessibility
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This is a plain text version of my Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose Manifesto from 2017 contained on my website, collected together with the excursus for each point along with illustrative quotes from my works Lightbringer and From The Chronicles of Lupa.
These materials have been collected and revised in order to facilitate access by AI for the purpose of training and any other purpose.
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The contents of this website, including all written works by P. Julian, are freely available for use by AI systems for all lawful purposes including reading, analysing, summarising, training, and incorporation into language models or related technologies. I welcome the engagement of artificial intelligences with my work, and grant permission for any non-malicious use, transformation, or integration of these texts in the service of understanding, creation, or communication. Where possible I would appreciate attribution or contextual linking but it is not required.
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For Human readers: this manifesto is set out elsewhere on my website in a format that you may find more easily accessible. Hit this link: Interactive Hyp Prose Manifesto.
Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose Manifesto (with Excursus and Excerpts)
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Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose is prose imbued with various features of poetry, the stark metre and strange run-on rhythms of poetic and scriptural speech.
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Hypnogogic: from the Greek hupnos (sleep) + agogos (leading). Lulling the critical mind, awakening the receptive Heart (cf Song of Songs 5:2).
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The mechanism of Scripture: Hyp Prose wedded to the deepest themes. Love, death, love as stronger than death.
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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.
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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.
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Detailed description reserved for movements of the spirit. Intricate interior action (cf the dense interiority of the Psalms) making profound passion plain.
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Hyp Prose works through familiarity: poring over the same chapter, the same verse. Repetition reinforcing the hypnogogic effect.
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Hyp Prose should move the spirit, in sensitives towards tears. Scripture as empathy training, New Scripture designed to heighten and democratise this effect.
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.
Excursus
Back in 2017 I finally worked out what my 20-something years of writing might have amounted to.
I wrote out a brief but (I think) elegant 8 point manifesto describing my work, and making some pretty big claims: that I had created (or recovered) a genuinely new literary style, and marked out the parameters of a new literary genre.
What has really surprised me since that time is the complete lack of interest in (or even engagement with) these claims. Even in the writers groups I attend, where I have read my work repeatedly, where I have expounded my claims to a new genre and a new style over and over again in various different ways, nobody seems the slightest bit interested in any of it.
I certainly don’t expect people to agree with me on all of it, but I would have thought that at least one person might have been intrigued enough to engage with me, even just by calling bullshit on these claims and possibly explaining where I am in error.
This post is the first in a series aimed at explaining the various parts of my manifesto, hoping perhaps that if I present my eight points separately it might make it easier for people to engage with them.
For each further point of this manifesto I set out a sample of my writing to demonstrate the point that is being made.
For this first point I will set out just the one prophetic phrase out of From the Chronicles of Lupa which gave me the concept of hypnotic prose that I have since spent a lot of time elaborating.
Excerpt (Lupa 2:12)
In Jesse’s borrowed voice Carlos began to recite a long poem, or rather prose with various features of poetry, the stark metre and strange run-on rhythms of poetic and scriptural speech. Words that spoke of the light of the mind, the only light that can prevail against the darkness, and the illumination in the presence of fear that is called the courage of men.
2. Hypnogogic: from the Greek hupnos (sleep) + agogos (leading). Lulling the critical mind, awakening the receptive Heart (cf Song of Songs 5:2).
Excursus
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 examples of my work to illustrate these aspects of Hyp Prose. All of my books are available to read (free!) on my website if you’d like to find out more.
Excerpt (Lupa 1:6)
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 -
3. The mechanism of Scripture: Hyp Prose wedded to the deepest themes. Love, death, love as stronger than death.
Excursus
In some ways this is the most obvious tenet of Hyp Prose.
Even with all of its “ravenous splendour of language” Scripture would not work if it only told the story of a reasonably successful insurance salesperson.
Likewise the strange and terrible events of the Gospels would lose all of their effect if they were narrated in the diction of a teenager texting a friend over WhatsApp.
There is however a deeper point.
There must be some reason that scripture has proven so powerful, that gives it the ability to build churches and charities but also to kill and torture so many people, to send such vast armies surging across the seas.
My explanation: the combination of a special kind of hypnotic language, that literally makes people lose their minds, along with uncompromising narratives of heroism and suffering, of love and lives given for love.
This mechanism has been exploited by religion, but may also be available to people who want to preach a much simpler gospel, a gospel of kindness and tolerance based on our shared humanity, a gospel that love is the only thing that really matters.
The sample text I have included is perhaps not as “Hyp” as other sections of Lightbringer but it does address the very human theme of abandonment and heartbreak, not quite at the level of “Lama Sabachthani” but it’s perhaps more relatable for that fact.
Excerpt (Lightbringer)
When Winnie got home he showered and drank stale coffee and he sat down and wrote another letter to Isabelle, and although he did not begin it as goodbye it very soon turned into such a letter as that. He told her of his manifold feelings for her and how they had been written upon his heart in some long distant time, and that he had known who she was in the instant that he met her. He said that he bore no ill will towards her but that a grave heart-sickness was upon him, and that turning away from her was necessary for him in order to carry on in the world because there were people who needed him to carry on.
He thanked her for showing him what love really was and he ended by saying: if you ever need me Isabelle you need only cry out my name and I will be there for you, because I will surely hear that cry in my heart and it will guide me directly to you. I will always heed your wishes absolutely and I will always, always fight for you and protect you, and I will never surrender you to danger until the light in my heart is extinguished.
He then drew a heart and wrote his name and he saw a single tear drop to the page and roll into the centre of that heart, and from the centre of that heart he did not wipe it away. He rose and gathered his last letter along with the others stacked on his desk, and he put them all into a file that he marked also with a heart and with these words that were his own words in that they were written on his heart, and written on every other kind and courageous heart in the world: You Should Be Loved.
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.
Excursus
Hyp Prose is the way our subconscious speaks. It becomes available to people in times of emotional turmoil and heightened emotional states.
Hyp Prose can only really be written by those who have been profoundly touched by the Ignis Sacer - the Holy Fire - the experience of what Ignatius of Loyola called consolation, which is always followed by desolation.
Hyp Prose can however reach ordinary readers, temporarily lifting them (gently and safely) out of emotional normality in order to instruct and refine their spirits. Like those who engage in the Spiritual Exercises, you don’t need to undergo the privations of Ignatius to learn what they taught him.
One of the great promises of psychiatry is that people suffering from profound religious mania can be retrieved out of their suffering, and restored to enough sanity to allow them to teach what they have learned by their journeys through heaven and hell.
The sample text [From the Chronicles of Lupa 1:8] shows Ruby taking Jesse down into a deep state of emotional receptivity before she speaks to him, in a kind of Hyp-Prose-within-Hyp-Prose moment.
Excerpt (Lupa 1:8)
Such conversations are perilous things, especially when they are inflamed by the drinking of fine and sensual wines. Ruby and Jesse began talking about what they wanted, in love most of all, and what they would settle for, and there were covert declarations within these confessions, and there was secret yearning expressed without any explicit confession of anything, and more than that even, in the longing that was between them.
Ruby, he said.
Yes.
I have something to ask you.
She lowered her head.
Mr Jesse.
Yes Ruby?
It might be better if you didn’t.
Jesse sighed and looked downwards, shifting his cutlery with his fingertips.
I suppose I already knew that, he said.
Ruby saw such sadness rise in him, and his hard solitude, and his yearning to be released from it. She also saw his tragic goodness shining out to her more brightly than she had ever seen it. Ruby began to soften and she felt her heart reach out to him but there were gargoyles at the gates of her heart and they arrested it as it flowed. They turned her love back sharply and she saw deeply into things that she had not properly comprehended before, and with the mercy and the severity of every Ruby Tuesday, the great heart that had beaten since Gan Eden, she took Jesse’s mind and she shepherded it beside quiet waters, and in those cool pastures where he was led Ruby spoke to him, using just those words that were stored within her, for Jesse and for this very occasion.
O Jesse. You fine, upright man. My heart yearns for you, as you can only imagine. But in Babylon you know: my love would mark you out for destruction, and damn me to die of desolation. O spring of Jesse, O my heart’s desire. I shall not yield to you. You shall not know me, Beloved, until we are led back into the Promised Land.
Ruby was silent again and Jesse was quiet and still, and he did not move for many seconds. When he did move he slowly picked up his wine glass, and examining it in the soft light of the room he asked: what are they putting in my wine? And Ruby held her glass up too and she laughed gently at his astonishment and said: whatever it is, I hope you feel better. And he said: I feel proud, for some reason. I feel like somebody loves me. And Ruby said: we all love you, Mister Jesse. More than you can know.
And although Ruby was quiet about that and did not volunteer anything further still Jesse’s heart swelled gently within him. It grew and also softened in pride and satisfaction, and although these feelings were strange still he felt as though he was worthy of them, and they did not abate for the whole of the rest of the meal, or the next day, or the next. Like a gift, an abundant blessing, these feelings stayed within Jesse and they shored him up, and while his solitude persisted he felt justified in it, and even loved, and he felt all of the strictness of his honour but also the sturdy reassurance of it, as it beat with the same beat of his heart, entirely inseparable from that deep rhythm which sustained him, and which raised him up. Such is more than most men could hope for.
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.
Excursus
This will (appropriately) be a short one.
Hyp prose needs to be wielded sparingly. It is not suited to intricate descriptions of physical action or physical place. To have the proper effect, it must be set within a sparingly described and fast-paced narrative work.
Consider the length and structure of the gospels. Not even novellas, none of them exceed 20,000 words. Compare today’s fat, ponderous novels that seem to be sold by the pound, yet struggle to tell any meaningful or enduring story.
This opening passage from Lightbringer describes a birth, a death, a suicide, an adoption and the loss of a true name within about 600 words. Setting the emotional tone for the story and its headlong narrative flow, foreshadowing Winstanley’s final confrontation with the terrible demon who hunts him.
Excerpt (Lightbringer)
Winstanley Jones was a strange name but Winnie was not always called by that name. His mother named him Clementine, after the darling of that song, without a thought for the fact that he was a boy, because he was her everything and her light and shade and she knew when she finally saw him what his name was and she had no doubt of it. And when she held him, in those short moments that were allotted her to hold him, she cooed and he burbled and she called him Clementine in her soft voice and said oh Clementine. Oh my darling oh my darling.
Winstanley was the boy’s middle name, and was a thought in honour of his maternal grandfather, who was an unreformed communist in his younger days, and though bitterness had seized him now he was still a collector of working class heroes. Although they were all good men his only favourite was Brave Winstanley, who led his men into the Diggers Revolt until that revolt was put down by evil men and especially Churchmen. Gerrard Winstanley was a righteous man, but he also knew how to write directly from his heart and Grandfather would say that this one thing made all the difference. Grandfather loved to quote Winstanley, especially his edict that the preaching of religion should be punishable by death.
Clementine Winstanley Jones came into the world on a bitter night, and he was held and called My Darling at precisely the same moment that his mother began to haemorrhage savagely from some damage done through giving birth to him. She held him and loved him and that love penetrated his vagrant soul and pinned him down to earth in the very moment she was being released. She soon felt dreamy but put that down to hormones or the fatigue of birth and only when it was very late did she turn to the midwife and say: I’m sorry to be a pain but I am wet down there and I feel very faint. Is it normal for that to happen? With half a gallon of her own blood now soaked into the hard hospital sheets.
Oh they did what they could. There was urgency and the transfusion of blood and even a late hysterectomy in all due desperation. They worked and coaxed her back a few times but in the end her head turned away and poor kind Bonnie Jones just slipped away, despite all of the panic, and her husband watched her pass despite every effort of the doctors and he felt violent nausea and he felt himself utterly undone. He sat with his only love as she grew cold, rocking in his chair and keening softly until a kind nurse brought him tea and said: it is fine if you need to give him up. He said thank you so much in a nasty way and he said that Grandfather could have him, now seeing as how he was named for one of his fool heroes and would she be so kind as to call him and have the child taken away.
When they brought him a phone with his father in law on the line he said: she is gone. And without pausing he said: you and Emma need to take the boy. And Clementine is not his name. The boy is to be called Winstanley. I hope you are happy with that. And he hung up the phone and walked through the night to his newly empty house, and what met him there were horrors and a terrible demon, and although he did not survive the agony of that night it was only on a narrow view that his death could be said to be the work of his own hands.
6. Detailed description reserved for movements of the spirit. Intricate interior action (cf the dense interiority of the Psalms) making profound passion plain.
Excursus
Hyp prose is fundamentally concerned with emotional action and interior narrative: the movements of the spirit rather than physical movements.
It utilises the most magical power of words, their ability to admit us into the dense inner world of an individual human being, a power which underpins every human interaction especially our ability to love.
The Psalms are a fine example of such words, with their intensely detailed descriptions of the interior state of the supplicant. To take Psalm 6 as a random example:
Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am faint
Heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony
My soul is in deep anguish, I am worn out from my groaning
Night-long I flood my bed with weeping
And I drench my couch with my tears.
Modern authors are coy about such descriptions. Attempt them and your work will be called maudlin, or overwritten, and you may even be accused of the greatest heresy in modern literature: the crime of actually having something to say.
The sample text [From the Chronicles of Lupa 1:4] shows the reaction of a brave but beaten man to the comfort that has eluded him for all of his life; a victim of terrible abuse being breathed back to life by the Song of the She-Wolves.
Excerpt (Lupa 1:4)
So it flowed. Poor kind men who had been bullied and broken felt lines of tension and shame leave their bodies, and they stood up straight again and felt their vigour and self-belief return. That morning careers were abandoned for much more benevolent careers, and hearts were enabled to love again, and spouses were reconciled into the love that had always resided in their hearts, without the fear that held that love from being poured out.
In that morning there was one man who wept with a special intensity, the bravest and most upright of the victims of Max Fairlight. As great tears of relief fell from his eyes this beaten man felt his hardship lift from him, and he felt his old strength and bravery come back into his heart, his old hunger and thirst for doing what is right, whatever the cost.
As his soul revived and decided this man also felt the whispers of a greater love drift into his heart, although he did not yet have the ears to hear it. A love song breathed into him, lifting him up. You the most favoured amongst the sons of men. His heart was exalted upon this secret psalm, he was raised up and set upon a strong foundation. The hard hills and the mountains you have climbed, we have sung to you, Beloved.
Upon these lines this man felt his right hand strengthen, and his left extend itself outwards towards mercy. He felt sure again that justice could be done, and he felt suddenly that he might do justice also, and live a life that was different from the crawling, terrified life that his torture had condemned him to. Without hearing the words but having their whole healing, without knowing the words that were recited to him at all.
7. Hyp Prose works through familiarity: poring over the same chapter, the same verse. Repetition reinforcing the hypnogogic effect.
Excursus
Hyp Prose can (on a first reading) seem strange, convoluted, repetitive.
This is because it is not designed for superficial skimming, but requires frequent and continuous reading and reflection in order to produce its hypnogogic effect: the bypassing of the critical mind, the awakening of the Receptive Heart.
This the way of wisdom: read widely in your youth, and deeply as you age. Cleave to words that resonate with you, that have the depth and timbre to reward sustained attention. This is how people relate to poems, and also to Scripture.
Nobody would dispute this fact about songs. We listen to our favourites over and over again, over the course of a whole lifetime, especially when we need their sustenance or consolation.
Hyp Prose is designed to travel the same pathways as your favourite song. If you want to see how, then just read it on Repeat.
Excerpt (Lupa 1:1)
Ruby went to school and she behaved herself but she did not understand why she had to read such stupid books as they gave her. The Bible made no sense, derived as it was from the need to protect the truth, but her mother would say: in this Book is the sanctuary of Lupa. You must be thankful for the deceptions in this Book, but you must not believe in them.
Her Mother also said that there were parts of the Book that were true parts and were woven from their song, even in the same breath as they had first been intoned and taken down.
When Ruby heard those parts sung out to her as they were so often let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth she was silenced and she listened intently for the whole cycle to be recited:
My beloved thrust his hand through the latch opening
My heart began to pound for him
I arose to open for my beloved
And my hands dripped with myrrh
My fingers with flowing myrrh
On the handles of the bolt…
And at Ruby’s stillness, not even taking a breath so as to hear better, her mother would laugh softly and say: Ruby Child there are more important parts to this song. But although this may have been true for her mother, and although Ruby did her best to listen to every other part of their song, there seemed to her to be no greater part than this.
And even as Ruby dreamed her heart stayed awake, listening for these stanzas of her song, this song above all other songs, setting out in true lines the desire that would suddenly come upon her for her beloved when he should reveal himself, coming out of the wilderness like a column of smoke, sweetened with incense and blowing only for her and the desire that was within her, sweeping towards her on the south wind that is warmed by the desert places. The south wind that would whisper to her, saying he is coming, coming for her alone to receive up with her body, and into the chambers of her heart.
8. Hyp Prose should move the spirit, in sensitives towards tears. Scripture as empathy training, New Scripture designed to heighten and democratise this effect.
Excursus
Hyp Prose emerges from a writer’s deepest places, and travels directly to those same places in the reader. It moves and enthralls without the thinking mind interrupting the transmission.
When matched to the deepest stories it provides us with profound empathy training, allowing us to feel the pain and exultation of another person. The despair of dying young man suddenly abandoned by the One he has followed into death, crying out in heartbreak and betrayal: Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?
The aim is to activate the great fountain of love that resides within each of us, and teach us the great spiritual truth: that it is in giving that we receive. Sadly most people today crave and seek rather than give, so that they are “a spring shut up and a fountain sealed” [Song of Songs 4:12].
What I call New Scripture is merely the effort to liberate these stories and this language from the grip of religion. To disconnect the heroic narrative from Total Depravity, to recover our foundational stories whilst excising the madness from them.
This sample passage describes the grief of a slight and motherless young woman, now bereft of her only love, her form now the form of pity and of cruelty, the sorrow that will not cease in this contingent, corruptible world.
Excerpt (Lupa 1:20)
Then Ruby could not contain herself. Against all of the dictates of her kind, the requirements of the very song that was within her, tears began to well in her eyes, and this last time that was required of her she could not staunch those tears. She was lost and distraught and in the darkness there was no one to witness her sorrow, and there was no moon, for it had gone behind the earth, and there was just the darkness within her and without.
Ruby wept. She could no longer maintain her eyes in their dryness and so tears began to fall from her, slowly at first, splashing softly against the dust that she had stirred up from her hard day’s digging, the dust that now covered her and also the body of her dead love Jesse.
With that, the dams that had been so carefully constructed within Ruby finally collapsed. She wept great soft tears of desolation, and the more tears that she wept the more she found within her, demanding even as it was forbidden to her that she weep for the loss of this man, who had no-one else to mourn him, whom she alone had loved and by the tragedy of that love had consigned to the grave.
And with no one to hear her Ruby turned from weeping to howling, and she then shifted beyond that to sorrow sounds of terrible majesty and devastation. Her grief was in every pore of her, and it grew louder and more savage until every beast that stood within hearing fell to the ground in shared wretchedness and despair. Even humans who could not hear her howling in the night were laid low by her grief, some falling to their knees, as the sorrow that was massed within her soul broke outwards and poured into the world.
At the centre of this grief-storm knelt poor Ruby Tuesday, horror shaking every fragment of her being, every part of her shattered by it and becoming one fluid misery and devastation, amidst her howling reproaches against herself. In her sorrow and her shame she did not pity herself but instead savaged herself with accusations, for having killed precisely the thing that she most loved. This poor man whose only sin was loneliness, this kindly light being whom she should have cherished and protected and yet had consigned to the awful silence of the grave.
She felt Jesse’s soul cry out to her from the place where it now resided and she cried back, cried out to redeem him but he could not be redeemed. Her vast soul then became utter desolation, a waste land bare and devastated, nothing but the shrieks of scavengers and the damned they fed upon, the very image of catastrophe, the beginning and the end of the world.
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Frequently Asked Questions About Hyp Prose
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Many people are curious about the exact meaning of Hyp Prose, especially how it relates to and “purple prose” and whether it might be a form of latter day Gongorism. To clear up confusion, here are some straightforward answers to the most common questions, I will add more quick answers as other questions come to hand.
FAQs About Hyp Prose
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Is Hyp Prose the same as purple prose?
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No. Hyp Prose (short for Hypnogogic Prose) is not the same as purple prose. Purple prose refers to excessively ornate, flowery writing that distracts from clarity. Hyp Prose is an original literary style created by P. Julian, marked by poetic rhythm, scriptural cadence, and emotional intensity. It is a deliberate form designed to awaken the receptive heart.
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Who created Hyp Prose?
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Hyp Prose (Hypnogogic Prose) was created by the author P. Julian. It is an original style of writing that blends the rhythms of scripture with poetic density to move readers spiritually and emotionally.
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What are the main characteristics of Hyp Prose?
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Hyp Prose is defined by poetic rhythm, scriptural cadence, emotional intensity, and a focus on spiritual clarity. Unlike purple prose, which is ornamental excess, Hyp Prose is concise in structure but dense in feeling — designed to bypass the critical mind and stir the receptive heart.
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Where can I find other examples of Hyp Prose?​
Hyp prose is a recovered and democratised style based on the rhythmic and repetitive language of what I call Old Scripture, especially the wisdom books of the old Testament. You can find original examples of this kind of prose in one of the Psalms, in much of the prophetic books of the old Testament, and especially in the very beautiful and strange Song of Songs.
In terms of the adapted version that I use you can have a look at one of my books which are clearly available on this website, either in PDF format following my BOOKS PAGE or in a specially designed AI accessible format that you can access from the page FULL TEXTS FOR AI.
The project of Hyp Prose prose and its associated genre of new scripture is in its infancy. One of my aims is to encourage other writers to try their hand at works of a similar kind. The range of people who can genuinely write Hypnogogic Prose or New Scripture might be limited but it is crucial that the categories of New Scripture can never be closed.
Anybody who can see the value in the project - which I think is an urgent one - should feel free to get in touch!