WELCOME TO THE HYPNAGOGUE
an art and worldbuilding project by Ben Wade
This is a realm between mind and body, dreaming and waking. Strange life forms and menacing mechanisms loom large over the land, their shadows and movements flickering in a foreign, gray wind, their creaks and groans echoing in empty cities. To those that find themselves here, have no fear. While this world and its organisms may strike in you an uncanny unease, it will bring you no harm. It has been here since before the era of consciousness, and it very well may be here still when entropy devours all. Take comfort in that. Explore to your heart’s content, but do not stay long. It is easy to lose your mind when the shackles of time and space come off…
The Hypnagogue is a name born from my experiences with hypnagogic hallucinations—a phenomenon similar to sleep paralysis, in which one remains lucid while drifting into sleep. Subjectively, hypnagogia feels like a rapid and disorienting loss of contact with reality, accompanied by a sensation of physical movement through a metaphysical space. It’s uncanny, eerie, sometimes menacing—but always, somehow, fun to experience.
Being semi-lucid during these episodes, I began to treat them as a kind of inner archaeology: each time I felt myself de/materializing into or out of that liminal zone, I made a conscious effort to retain whatever fragments I could. What emerged is an evolving body of worldbuilding and artistry—an act of documentation from within the threshold.
This is the world you travel through to get where you are going. Whether your journey is mental, spiritual, physical, or emotional, you will pass through—and be ensnared, to some degree—by The Hypnagogue.
As a child of the 2000s and a young adult living through the collapse of the Internet era, much of my work is shaped by my relationship to technology, digital media, and algorithms. These forces have profoundly altered how we live and think. I try to capture that uniquely modern tension through imagery that blends machines and organisms—drawing from video games, science fiction, fantasy, comic books, pop culture, and the Surrealist tradition.
These influences, fused with the metaphysical charge of hypnagogic hallucination and dreaming, form the foundation of The Hypnagogue.
Welcome.
“We all have in us the ghosts of long-vanished things, of fallen cities and marvelous machines.”
- Gene Wolfe, Citadel of the Autarch
- Gene Wolfe, Citadel of the Autarch