due to sleep deprivation and other conditions, resulting in impaired cognition and even amnesia. In his book, Zen and the Brain, James H. Austin cites speculation that regular meditation develops a specialized skill of "freezing the hypnagogic process at later and later stages" of the onset of sleep, initially in the alpha wave stage and later in theta. History Early references to hypnagogia are to be found in the writings of Aristotle, Iamblichus, Cardano, Simon Forman, and Swedenborg. Romanticism brought a renewed interest in the subjective experience of the edges of sleep. In more recent centuries, many authors have referred to the state; Edgar Allan Poe, for example, wrote of the "fancies" he experienced "only when I am on the brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so." The serious scientific inquiry began in the 19th century with Johannes Peter Müller, Jules Baillarger, and Alfred Maury, and continued into the 20th century with Leroy. Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist contains an elaborate description of the hypnagogic state in Chapter XXXIV. The advent of electroencephalography (EEG) has supplemented the introspective methods of these early researchers with physiological data. The search for neural correlates for hypnagogic imagery began with Davis et al. in the 1930s, and continues with increasing sophistication. While the dominance of the behaviorist paradigm led to a decline in research, especially in the English speaking world, the later twentieth century has seen a revival, with investigations of hypnagogia and related altered states of consciousness playing an important role in the emerging multidisciplinary study of consciousness. Nevertheless, much remains to be understood about the experience and its corresponding neurology, and the topic has been somewhat neglected in comparison with sleep and dreams; hypnagogia has been described as a "well-trodden and yet unmapped territory". The word hypnagogia entered the popular psychology literature through Dr. Andreas Mavromatis in his 1983 thesis, while hypnagogic and hypnopompic were coined by others in the 1800s and noted by Havelock Ellis. The term hypnagogic was originally coined by Alfred Maury to name the state of consciousness during the onset of sleep. Hypnopompic was coined by Frederic Myers soon afterwards to denote the onset of wakefulness. The term hypnagogia is used by Dr. Mavromatis to identify the study of the sleep-transitional consciousness states in general, and he employs hypnagogic (toward sleep) or hypnopompic (from sleep) to identify the specific experiences under study. Important reviews of the