Adventures in Hypnagogia—1
“A great deal more is known than has been proved.”—R. Feynman
It was the moment when one self turned to another self and said, Did you see that?
I can’t remember when that moment happened, but it was sometime here in the riper stages of life—I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon when I was younger. I can’t know for certain if these things suddenly appeared, or if they were there all along and I suddenly became aware of them. I suspect the latter, and that for years they had been impossible to see because they were so obvious. But once I became aware of them, I couldn’t not see them. Like the physical universe, nothing was added but awareness.
“They” are the endless micro-dramas that populate the liminal spaces of my mind: somewhere between awake and dream—and for all their ephemerality comprise a major part of my existence. They do not live in the realm of Morpheus, and have less staying power than dreams. They are not hallucinations, they are not like the visions of psychoactive drugs. They are mundane but unpredictable scenes that don’t seem derived from my own experience—as novel as chance encounters with specific people I have never met. It’s all innately paradoxical: if I become aware of myself, they vanish, leaving only a feeling, which doesn’t survive long. I am aware of them as long as I’m not aware that I’m aware of them. It is hard to give examples—they do not accompany the mind in its passage back into the waking world, even seconds after. Sometimes they are like eavesdropping on alien experience, sometimes they are the mind considering speculative flash narratives past and around an actual event, sometimes they’re just weird. They are tireless.
Then at some point I came across the word “hypnagogic”—which I had never heard before. “Of, relating to, or occurring in the period of drowsiness immediately preceding sleep,” says Merriam Webster, and quotes Cate McQuaid, “The hypnogogic state is that heady lull between wakefulness and sleep when thoughts and images flutter, melt, and transform into wild things.” That sounded about right, except, for me, these micro-dramas show up whenever I close my eyes, and occupy the space between ego and non-ego. I did some reading and concluded that the phenomenon is common, and sometimes revelatory (Kekule von Stradonitz and the benzene ring), but since it didn’t seem to describe exactly my case, I hijacked the word and have used it to describe my own experience ever since. Then, much later, I came across another word (coined by cognitive neurologist Adam Zeman in 2015): aphantasia. I looked it up—and sure enough, “not fantasia”—“without imagination”—or more mundanely, “the inability to form mental images of objects that are not present.” I took this the way I take all horrifying human attributes: nature throws everything out there, and there’s no way to predict what will prove advantageous to adaptability. Maybe there’s some advantage to a mind empty of imagery—the freeing of space for some undistracted ratiocination that will enrich us, perhaps, and aphantasic people look down on the mental frivolity of those with scenic minds. Still, I can hardly imagine life without these stays I have come to depend on against vacancy and loneliness.
Is human experience—which is at least mostly, if not all, mental—continuous or discrete? Like “wave or particle,” I would say it’s both. What seems discrete when you’re looking seems continuous when you’re not. As I said, once I became aware of my hypnagogic life, I could never again be unaware of it—as I once described the discovery of my own tinnitus. And I saw hypnogogic visions as liminal phenomena—occupying the spaces after the mind finishes one thing and before it starts another. Because as Roger Penrose, in a more cosmic context, once observed, “Nothingness is not stable.” I saw these endless micro-dramas as a sort of glue—dark energy maybe—holding reality together.
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I have come to enjoy my hypnagogic life, and depend on it in waiting rooms and dull moments, but how have I come to understand it?
I haven’t—because as with most things, experiencing it precludes the need to understand it—but we do like to put things into contexts, and there are fanciful and unfanciful ways to think about it.
Phantom memories of another life? Interesting, but if you mean “past” life, my hypnagogic reveries usually have the markings of the current time, more or less, not the past, and deal with people and events I have no conscious knowledge or memory of. Maybe better to say, another self—or one that took one of the infinite other roads that keep branching out with the unfolding of reality. And from here, the denizens of that parallel dimension appear like ghosts. This is perhaps what ghosts are: not entities in our realm, but imperfectly perceived traces of their reality in another.
The idea that at one time and place or another human beings have lived every kind of experience, and it doesn’t matter who lived it, all human experience belongs to everybody? Consciousness is universal and accessible to all—you could trade with someone else’s perspective and never know it, because “you” are your center of consciousness. And your own experiences, once lived and coded into memory, are no less ephemeral than the ones that float mysteriously through your mind.
Tetris effect? I experience this frequently, when my mind keeps “reading” after I have put down my book and closed my eyes—generating an inner monologue that is pure invention, maybe connected to what I was reading, maybe not—sensible on some trans-verbal level. But that’s as far as the Tetris effect goes.
Epiphenomenon? So science would have it. And maybe these vignettes are negligible and accidental byproducts of the more measurable workings of the mind. Unless epiphenomena are the scraps left over when the mold of the prevailing narrative has cut out its cookies—a sure sign the narrative is incomplete.
The Default Mode Network? Modern neuroscience has determined that some network of the brain is always active, and the whole never really “rests.” So it may be helpful, but not really accurate, to say that the DMN characterizes the brain at rest—more accurate to say it is active when the brain is not consciously engaged in anything: what the brain thinks about when it’s not thinking about anything. This is the space where hypnagogic visions originate. But how to explain their mimicry of previously unknown human experience? It’s like the fantasies, science says, generated by the dying brain. To which I can only say, if the brain is that good at creating the illusion of reality, how can we know if what we think of as “true” reality is not an analogous simulation? And how can we presume that there is a base reality common to all?
The English spiritual teacher Rupert Spira has an interesting way of framing the matter. Spira’s “Direct Path” to Enlightenment involves not the discovery of something previously unknown, but like Plato the recognition of something previously known and forgotten: our “true nature.” It is an anti-dualistic way of thinking: our true nature is the One. The enemy of this awareness is ego, which wants the job of “true nature” for itself, though in spite of its arsenal, is woefully unequal to the task. “When we let go of the content of experience, we recognise our being, which we were always knowing without realising it.” So the combatants are awareness of experience and awareness of being. Spiritual guides like Spira always say “let go” as though that were something you could just decide to do—as though the preoccupation of a major part of your brain was something you could easily dismiss. In other words, it’s not easy, and when the realm of non-experience seems an existential threat to the ego, the ego will manufacture drama out of self-preservation.
Could be that.
Hypnagogic visions are the antithesis of self-preoccupation.
March 15, 2024