hypnopaedia

These are the thoughts of Bernard Maxwell as he reflects on The World State’s sleep-teaching technique, hypnopaedia, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, before concluding: “Idiots!”

There is evidence that he forged a check to finance one of his expeditions, and he slept through most of his classes at the U. of P. But apparently the boy could learn in his sleep long before the hypnopaedia boom, and he had a trick memory besides.

In Brave New World Huxley had his director of Hatcheries and Conditioning use a technique called hypnopaedia, by which subjects got moral training during sleep.