About

(exit)

WELCOME TO THE HYPNAGOGUE

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. This is the place where things end up. This is the space after the End and before the Beginning. This is where time and space swap roles with each other. This is the first human colony settled inside our collective unconscious. This is what we perceive when things accelerate past our ability to perceive. This is the stagnant decay of ceaseless, mindless, unidirectional change.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Hypnagogue is a name born from my experiences with hypnagogic hallucinations, a lucid state that occurs while drifting into sleep. In these moments, reality begins to dissolve: space stretches, sounds warp, and the body feels in motion through a metaphysical terrain. It’s uncanny, eerie, sometimes menacing—but always, somehow, exhilarating.

I began by treating these scattered experiences as a kind of inner archaeology, consciously documenting what I could recover from the zone between waking and dreaming. Over time, what started out as an effort to capture the threshold between waking and dreaming in visual form slowly morphed into something more broad: an attempt to flesh out the general concept of a Threshold space as a space of its own. I dubbed this world The Hypnagogue: an evolving body of imagery, worldbuilding, and art, hybridizing mediums and exploring modern day cycles of technologically mediated hyperstition.

As a child of the 2000s and a young adult living through an era of the Internet dominated by “AI slop” and rapidly proliferating digital content, much of my work is inspired by technology, digital media, and algorithms— how we use them and how they change us in return. Additionally, I find myself preoccupied with ideas of decay, renewal, cybernetics, and the cannibalistic nature of art and culture. These forces have profoundly altered how we imagine ourselves, remember things, relate to each other, and find meaning in life, and have accelerated and automated what remains.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“We all have in us the ghosts of long-vanished things, of fallen cities and marvelous machines.”

- Gene Wolfe, Citadel of the Autarch

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Site background:
“Noise Painting 1”
Looping video, 2024

This is a polaroid of me.

email: wbenwade@gmail.com

instagram
vimeo

something stirs from beyond The Hypnagogue

something stirs
from beyond
The Hypnagogue