About Rebecca Lemov

My Story

Throughout my life, I’ve been fascinated by how ideas form—how they drift through the mind, tangle with experience, and transform us in ways both subtle and profound. This story traces back to my student years, when I first discovered that understanding the mind sometimes means entering it from the inside.

The Early Struggle to Write

When I was in college facing a looming paper deadline, I often struggled to pull my ideas together. I’d think, if I can just read one more article or one more book on the topic, I’ll know what I want to say. I’ll be able to synthesize it all! Sometimes that process (okay, call it procrastination) led to days of delay while I dredged the library for new sources.

Inevitably, the time would come when I had either read everything I could find or was so close to the deadline that I really had no choice but to start writing. This was the hard part—until I invented a secret method.

My Discovery of a Strange Method

The method was — I would stuff my head full of thoughts, writings, notes, musings, and then lie down on the couch in our common room with a note pad stationed on a nearby table. The pad had to be very close to hand, with a pen ready.

Next, I’d fall asleep (this was easy, as I was a chronically sleep deprived college student), and just as I was halfway to full oblivion — in a state I later learned was called the hypnogogic state—all that had been floating around in my head would coalesce.

I’d somehow wake myself up before reaching full sleep, and, while only half conscious, would jot a note on the paper — a memory-jogging phrase of some sort. When I turned to the note later (after a nap) I would usually be able to decipher the phrase. Say “trail of flowers” or “avenue of infinity” or “free will is not free” in a way that allowed me to organize my paper and write it according to that theme. It still amazes me that this worked.

Realizing the Power of Altered States

It’s now decades later. I look back at my long career studying how people are changed — coercively persuaded — through brainwashing. I’ve explored how techniques and technologies can affect our psyches and how normalized dissociative states can be.

When I reflect on it all, I often return to that early method. In fact, I didn’t quite invent it, and it turns out that several famous thinkers, such as Aldous Huxley, were known for using sleep states and half-sleep states for inventing things or organizing their ideas.

Although today I use meditation for the same purpose, my hypnogogic nap strategy was one of the first times I realized definitively that I could change my own state of mind for the better. I could access an altered state to gain new knowledge.

From Curiosity to Career

Years afterwards, having finished my undergraduate degree in English literature from Yale and graduate school in the anthropology of science at UC Berkeley, I saw a throughline to my old method. It caused me to start teaching a class in the history of brainwashing and mind-control techniques while I was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington.

The Big Questions That Still Drive Me

The reason I did this was that at the heart of what we call brainwashing are a series of questions.

• How are we changed in different situations?
• Are you really you?
• Can we be changed against our will?
• What are the nightmare scenarios in which this seems to have happened—to POWs, to people who join cults, to those who are kidnapped or abused, or to others who simply get engrossed in our screens?
• How do people tend to collaborate in some of these negative transformations?
• What if we are much more malleable than we think?
• Can we use this capacity for good, for positive transformation?