Seed Magazine has a video of a fascinating conversation between sleep neuroscientist Robert Stickgold and film director Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Stickgold has reinvigorated sleep research by investigating the borderlands of consciousness with a series of novel experiments.
I wrote briefly about one of my favourites in Mind Hacks (the book):
An ingenious study published in Science did manage to investigate the role of some of the deeper brain structures in hypnagogia, specifically the medial temporal lobes which are particularly linked to memory function. The researchers asked five patients who had suffered medial temporal lobe damage to play several hours of Tetris. Damage to this area of the brain often causes amnesia, and the patients in this study had little conscious memory for more than a few minutes at a time. On one evening, some hours after their last game, the players were woken up just as they started to doze and were asked for their experiences. Although they had no conscious memory of playing the game, all of the patients mentioned images of falling, rotating Tetris blocks. This has given us some strong evidence that the hypnagogic state may be due (at least in part) to unconscious memories appearing as unusual hypnagogic experiences.
Michel Gondry is best known for being discovered by Bj√∂rk (no, not that one), directing a clutch of essential music videos (including The Chemical Brothers’ startling Let Forever Be), and moving into big cinema.
His biggest cinema success to date is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which has become a modern mind-bending classic with its feat firmly in cognitive science.
Gondry’s new movie, The Science of Sleep, also explores the mind’s outer reaches.
The pair discuss how psychology and art have tackled sleep, and how the logic of causation gets warped by both science and dreaming.
Link to Seed Magazine video with Stickgold and Gondry.
Link to fantastic article on the cognitive science of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Mind Hacks 
Apparently I’m a victim of involuntary human experimentation. While the “harassers” involved in this latest phase of cruelty were pushing me to the camp of people who claim “electronic harassment” (with directed energy weapons, for example), it seemed to me that the symptoms I have experienced are more along the lines of something “like” hypnagogia. My story is too long and sordid to write here, but for the trauma part of whatever this is I do have evidence and a case number that is going no where (and constant hacking to boot).
I thought that someone might like to look at these claims of electronic harassment with weapons and see if it fits into some kind of hypnagogia… Not that I would claim it is this, but rather that the harassment is actually something that simulates those symptoms. Those communities appear to have many fakes along with real victims of something – the question is what are they victims of?