Waking Sleep: The Hypnogogic State
By Gary Lachman
The brief transition between wakefulness and sleep we experience each night has been known by many names: the borderland state, the half-dream state, the pre-dream condition. Its technical name is the hypnagogic state and, along with dreaming, it is one of the most fascinating altered states of consciousness we can experience without the use of drugs.
In the hypnagogic state, visions, voices, weird insights and unusual sensations greet us as we drift out of consciousness. Faces may appear, threatening or comical. A landscape may open up, with distant mountains and wide, expansive vistas. Geometric forms, jewels, diamonds and intricate patterns may dance before our minds eye, not unlike those seen under the influence of certain psychoactive substances. Splashes of colour, flares, sparks and cloud-like forms-known as entoptic lights, phosphenes or eigenlicht, may drift through our drowsing consciousness, accompanied by strange, nonsensical sentences announcing portentous truths. We may feel we are floating, or that our body has grown to enormous proportions, or that we have suddenly grasped the answer to the riddle of the Universe.
The term hypnagogic was coined by the 19th-century French psychologist LF Alfred Maury, and is derived from two Greek words, Hypnos (sleep) and agogeus (guide, or leader). Some years after Maury, the psychical researcher FWH Myers coined a complimentary term, hypnopompic, to cover similar phenomena occurring as we wake from sleep. Some researchers are keen to split hairs, but in general there seems little difference between the material produced in either state, the main difference being which point of the sleep cycle investigators have chosen to observe.
But if Maury, an indefatigable dream diarist, was the first to give the condition its official title, he had only recognised something that observant sleepers had known for centuries. One of the first to remark on hypnagogic phenomena was Aristotle, who spoke of the affections we experience when sinking into slumber, and the images which present themselves to us in sleep. In the third century AD, Iamblichus, the Neo-Platonic philosopher, wrote of the voices and bright and tranquil light that came to him in the condition between sleeping and waking and which he believed were a form of god-sent experience. There is much evidence to suggest that the alchemists of the Middle Ages made use of a form of hypnagogia during their lengthy preparations and distillations. The weird characters and eerie landscapes that fill alchemical illustrations would not be out of place in a hypnagogic hallucination. In 1600, the astrologer Simon Forman wrote of apocalyptic visions of mountains and hills which came rolling against him on the point of sleep and beyond which he could see vast boiling waters. Not long after, the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes spoke of images of lines and angles seen on the edge of sleep accompanied by an odd kind of fancy to which he could give no particular name.
In the 18th century, the philosopher, scientist and visionary Emmanuel Swedenborg developed a method of inducing and exploring hypnagogic states, during which he travelled to heaven, hell and other planets. Other occultists followed in his footsteps. Oliver Fox, a theosophical writer in the early 20th century, used the hypnagogic hallucination of a doorway as a starting point for his astral travelling. The magical artist Austin Osman Spare journeyed to hypnagogic worlds and brought back images to adorn his canvases. Rudolf Steiner, whose visions of the Akashic Record seem very much like hypnagogic experiences, advised that the best time for communicating with the dead was in the period between waking and sleep. Steiner claimed that if you asked the dead a question as you fell asleep, they would answer you the next morning as you woke up. Other explorers have included William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allen Poe, Gerard de Nerval, Havelock Ellis, CG Jung, Jean Paul Sartre, Ernst Jünger and the novelist Robert Irwin, to name just a few. In Irwins 1996 novel Exquisite Corpse, Caspar, his surrealist hero, wanders about aimlessly in an almost continual hypnagogic state. Writers have always had an affinity with hypnagogia. Robert Desnos, with André Breton one of the leading voices of Surrealism, had a profound knack for automatic trance writing, aided by an enviable ability to fall asleep at will; something most other writers find only in their readers.
Most scientific accounts of hypnagogia view it much as they do dreaming - a random, meaningless activity of the brain, a means, at best, of clearing its circuits, but more likely just a way of dumping psychic clutter. That reams of anecdotes and hundreds of introspective accounts by non-scientists show the shallowness of this approach need not be stressed. Anyone with the interest, time and determination can quickly discover that the dreaming brain is engaged in creative, analytical and, not infrequently, paranormal activity, merely by paying attention to the mental junk it is supposedly throwing out. But while dreams are never observed, except for infrequent patches of lucidity, but always analysed after the fact, the same is not true of hypnagogia. With a little practice, anyone can learn how to watch otherwise obscure mental processes at work; processes which, according to some investigators, take place continuously alongside our waking rational mental states. As well as providing some fascinating interior entertainment, familiarising yourself with hypnagogia is probably the best and most reliable method of developing a working relationship with your unconscious mind. Contrary to A Alvarez, whose cursory account in his book Night: An Exploration of Night Life, Night Language, Sleep and Dreams leaves much to be desired, hypnagogic phenomena are not wholly impervious to art, narrative and interpretation. They have a recognisable structure and meaning. And, like other products of the dark side of the mind, they have an intelligence that often exceeds that of the waking mind observing them.
One of the earliest modern explorers of hypnagogic states was the Russian journalist and philosopher PD Ouspensky. Although best known as an interpreter of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky was a insightful thinker in his own right, and some of his earliest work involves a close observation of dreams. In 1905, he began a study of what today are known as lucid dreams, dreams in which we are conscious that we are dreaming. Ouspensky realised that the best way to achieve this state was to try to preserve his awareness as he drifted off into sleep. His attempts to do this created what he called a half-dream state, in which he both slept and did not sleep. Ouspensky also discovered something known to other hypnagogic voyagers: that creating these states at night usually led to a fitful sleep. He soon discovered that it was preferable to observe half-dream states in the morning, when he was awake but still in bed.
Ouspenskys essay On the Study of Dreams in his book A New Model of the Universe is full of important insights. His half-dream states filled him with a sensation of astonishment and extraordinary joy because he could see and understand how dreams were created, an experience he shared with the 19th-century French Orientalist and dream diarist Hervey de Saint-Denys. One of Ouspenskys insights was into the presence of an artist in his dreams, who could take the slightest bit of material and create from it a remarkably real adventure. Ouspensky recounts how he observed the dream artist at work during one of his half-dream states.
I am asleep. Golden dots, sparks and tiny stars appear and disappear before my eyes. These sparks and stars gradually merge into a golden net with diagonal meshes which moves slowly and regularly in rhythm with the beating of my heart... The next moment the golden net is transformed into rows of brass helmets belonging to Roman soldiers marching along the street below. I... watch them from the window of a high house in... Constantinople... I see the sun shining on their helmets. Then suddenly I detach myself from the window-sill and... fly slowly over the houses, and then over the Golden Horn in the direction of Stamboul. I smell the sea, feel the wind, the warm sun...
Ouspensky also discovered that he had a certain control over these states and could alter his half-dreams at will, an ability that many readers of lucid dream manuals work assiduously to perfect. But what is most arresting is Ouspenskys remark that we have dreams continuously, both in sleep and in a waking state. Had he lived to see it, Ouspensky would have been gratified by the hard, neurological evidence for this fact. According to neuroscientists Denis Pare and Rodolfo Llinas, the brains simultaneous 40 Hz neural oscillations, which are associated with consciousness, also occur during REM sleep. Given this, Pare and Llinas were led to the conclusion that the only difference between our dreaming and waking states is that in waking states, the closed system that generates oscillatory states is modulated by incoming stimuli from the outside world. In other words, what we call waking state is really an REM dream state, with a sensory topping. Or, as Ouspensky put it, we shouldnt speak of being either asleep or awake, but of sleep plus waking state.
Another early hypnagogic explorer was the Freudian psychologist Herbert Silberer. Silberer was more independent minded than most of Freuds followers, and he paid for his intellectual freedom tragically, comitting suicide shortly after being excommunicated from the masters circle. (He died gruesomely, hanging himself and leaving a flashlight shining in his face, so his wife would see him when she came home.) Silberer wrote a book about occultism and psychology, Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts, which pre-dates Jungs alchemical explorations by decades. His interest in hypnagogia began accidentally and his central insight is that the hypnagogic state is profoundly autosymbolic, i.e. that the symbols and images produced represent either the thoughts or the physical or mental state of the hypnagogist. In 1909 he published a paper on his research. One afternoon, drowsing on his couch, Silberer thought about a problem in philosophy, comparing the different systems of Kant and Schopenhauer. He had difficulty keeping the two views firmly in mind, but kept making the effort. When he believed he had Schopenhauers position firmly fixed, he returned to Kant, but couldnt find him. Then a dream image came to him: he was asking a secretary for some information. The secretary disregarded him entirely and finally gave him an unfriendly look. It struck Silberer that this hypnagogic dream was a symbol of his unsuccesful efforts to find Kants argument.
Other examples fill Silberers paper. Thinking of improving an awkward passage in an essay, Silberer received an image of himself planing a piece of wood. Reflecting on the ambiguity of the human condition, he saw himself standing on a stone jetty extending far out into a dark sea. Losing his train of thought, he tried hard to retrieve it but couldnt. The hypnagogic image was of a piece of typesetting with the last few lines gone.
One little known hypnagogic explorer is the Danish philosopher Jurij Moskvitin. In his little-read Essay on the Origin of Thought, Moskvitin desribes how he came to observe states of mind when consciousness is kept somewhere halfway between the waking state and dream. Moskvitin became aware of strange sparks and smoke-like forms, which upon close and intense observation became the elements of waking dreams, forming persons, landscapes, strange mathematical forms... The sparks, Moskvitin writes, reminded him of the tips of waves glittering in the sun which on prolonged observation appeared to be strange rings and nets moving swiftly over the waves.
Mavromatis, in a speculative chapter, relates hypnagogia to what is described in Tantric Yoga as the Fourth State, the junction of waking, sleeping and dreaming. Curiously, this intersection of states is parallelled in the anatomy of the brain itself. Mavromatis points out that the thalamus, which he conjectures is the centre of consciousness and the probable source of hypnagogic phenomena, is anatomically linked to the reptilian brain, limbic system and the cerebral hemispheres the three houses of the triune brain. Each of the three brains has a consciousness of its own, and Mavromatis remarks that the consciousness of one would appear very strange to that of another. In hypnagogia this is precisely what happens. If a minimum level of cortical arousal is maintained at the point of sleep Silberers effort to think then the consciousness of the old brain can be observed.
We may not want to follow Mavromatis this far. But his study of hypnagogia is the most thorough to date, and it is difficult to see how it will be surpassed as the standard work. In any case, its clear that he, and the other hypnagogists weve looked at, have certainly given all of us something to sleep on.
SOURCE: Fortean Times
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