Light the Towel: Narrative and the Negotiated Unconscious
June 24, 2013 J. Prendergast
A novelist writing a fractured, multi-voice narrative describes feeling estranged from the work yet strangely familiar with it, as the stories resisted linear coherence. The paper examines this experience through the lens of altered states of consciousness, particularly hypnagogia—the state between wakefulness and sleep—drawing on Andreas Mavromatis's work to explain how the unconscious shapes authorial intention and narrative material without full conscious control.