I was introduced to this phenomenon through Kurzweil's book "How to create a mind". He claims that the brain is massively parallelized pattern recognition machine, with consciousness being a censor that filters results. While in hypnagogia, this censoring function is suppressed and you are able to make "unthinkable" connections between ideas you normally think are unrelated. Of course, you should just take notes of these connections and later evaluate them rationally to see if they have any merit. It's very exciting that technology might be able to prolong and enhance this creative state of mind.
Until now I never knew that there was a name for "hypnagogia". For most of my life, I was never able to remember this period of sleep, but over the last few years that has changed (not intentionally, so I don't know what changed in my body to cause the difference). I've developed some level of awareness during it and can wake myself up from it, then remember at least some of it. If you've never experienced it, it's like every part of your brain is talking to every other part of your brain, and you have many bizarre connections of thoughts happening in parallel. It's different than a normal dream, where it seems there is only one "thread" running at a time.
These have happened intermittently through my life when my stress is high. This is only personal clue I can give to you "why" otherwise maybe you're just getting good at it.
In my last episode, I was floating toward a wall and all these thoughts were firing, "you're in a dream", "you'll go through the wall", "don't be afraid" but the rational side that felt like I was going to slam into a wall freaked out just at the wall & I woke. I still wish I just let myself slip through the wall..
Generally in a dream state like that, I find that what you believe & intend will happen will happen whether it makes sense or not. You knew you were dreaming and that the wall was immaterial, but you didn’t accept it in time. That’s one of the basic skills involved in lucid dreaming, really, influencing the dream by thinking “Oh, of course this is what will happen next” without pushing it too hard and waking yourself up (or getting stuck in sleep paralysis, in my case).
If you have nightmares, lucid dreaming techniques can be helpful for overcoming them. People often make stressful dreams worse on themselves by worrying “What if the monster catches up to me?” or “What if my weapon doesn’t do anything to it?”—you’ve got to follow it up with “Nah, I think it’s friendly and I can ride it” or “Of course my attack will work”.
I reliably have dreams that involve flooding when I am stressed or frustrated. I'm not particularly good at remembering dreams, don't try, but after one dream that seemed particularly 'symbolic,' I read some Jung and now I recognize that, in almost every dream I do remember, there are archetypes and symbols that he mentions. Jung wasn't really 'systematic,' but there are on order of 10-100 sub/objects in dreams that he emphasizes quite a bit and I see these in mine. Also, I tend to only remember a dream at times when my 'subconscious is [probably] trying to tell me something'
Yep, I see dreams same way and enjoyed reading Jung a lot in college. It makes sense that stress would induce more dreams if you saw dreams as mechanisms to heal your own mind, or at very least, point out the problem. I have read in other texts that we live out our ego fantasies in dreams (both scary & exhilarating) because otherwise it's a "pain" we can't handle until we get a taste for it.
You might find the dream dictionary[1] interesting.
>"I don't know what changed in my body to cause the difference"
For me it was gaining a better understanding of basic physics. Something I was never taught at an early age due to a cult like upbringing. Now questioning all I have ever been taught is second nature in my waking life. Even basic things like was that shadow normal? "Oh right, nothing divine there." So now that has leaked into my dream state, whenever physics goes weird (mostly water not flowing right or objects that don't respond in a proper manner) I instantly question it and then become aware of my dream state.
Did you have a kid or start traveling more? I noticed that when I am on a plane (usually very sleepy b/c I can only afford red eyes), I drift off a lot, but get woken up a lot too (PA announcement, food cart to the knee, etc.)
I had something like what you're describing as I was developing mild sleep apnea. Starting using those nasal separator strips religiously and got back to having consistently deep "dreamless" sleep ... but no lucid dreams.
I read somewhere that Thomas Edison used to take naps with ball bearings in his hands. At the instant he fell asleep, the bearings rolled out of his hands and hit the floor and woke him up during this transition state.
My farmer friends call it a "spoon nap" sit in a chair holding a spoon, as soon as you fall asleep the spoon drops and you can get back to work. Typically taken directly after a big lunch.
My favorite use of Hypnagogia is to find things that I have lost around the house. It's able to pull memories out of your brain that you can't usually access (analogous to backup tapes in your garage I guess).
When I was younger I was able to make music by counting beats in my head with a hi-hat just before I hit a hypnagogia state. I knew I was there when the hi hat would keep counting even after I stopped consciously doing counting, then an entire analog and digital orchestra in my brain would start playing wonderful tunes. Of course I could never remember them after, but it doesn't matter.
> He claims that the brain is massively parallelized pattern recognition machine, with consciousness being a censor that filters results. While in hypnagogia, this censoring function is suppressed and you are able to make "unthinkable" connections between ideas you normally think are unrelated.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."
William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
Hypnagogia.. Didn't hear that word before. I get that a lot and tried to explain it to other people, but nobody seem to understand what I am talking about.
It feels like I am dreaming while I am still awake in some kind of transitional state, where I am not conscious and also not asleep. It is not the same as lucid dreaming, which I had a couple of times also.
That moment when your brain falls asleep in class and tells you it unveiled the deep connection between carnival blister peanut texture and the quantum variational bound. And then you wake up suddenly and get scared because you think you might have yelled out something stupid.
not just you - I didn't have a name for it, but my brain pretty much does free-association in that phase. On more than one occasion I've jolted awake because I've had a earth-shattering revelation, only to realise my idea was already invented (hot air balloon) or pretty ridiculous (like having your toaster burn the day's agenda on your toast).
I can't help but wonder: how many multi-million dollar ideas have I had and then promptly forgot as I got into deeper sleep?
Hmmm, you're onto something. If I could lower my morals just a bit, I could parlay these crazy ideas into fanciful crowd-funded cash-grabs. I'll be the visionary - I'll need a technical "co-founder" (to handle the photoshops and cheery promo videos)
I have this too. Suddenly I realise that each line of code I am writing is a doorway to a different parallel universe.
Or maybe that the numbers on the clock indicate the distance I have to run in the track meet.
My girlfriend has told me that sometimes when we drift off to sleep talking, I'll start making less and less sense. She occasionally interviews me and can keep me going in this free-association state for a couple of minutes. I'll have to get to her take notes. :)
The worst instance of this for me was when I was younger and would get a high fever. My brain would just constantly go over the same concepts, try to reconcile them, fail, retry etc.
Usually it would attempt something similar to yours, like reconciling the concept of orange with a physical shape, which just immediately fails.
>It feels like I am dreaming while I am still awake in some kind of transitional state, where I am not conscious and also not asleep
I've had this start happening to me in the past year. When I was a kid I would have horrible, recurring nightmares for months on end that were difficult to remember. At some point in middle/highschool I stopped having dreams altogether (or at least stopped remembering them entirely). It was great as I would no longer wake up in a panic or stay up incredibly late in order to get to sleep. Recently however, I've started having dreams like you describe. My sleep schedule has changed as well. I get up at 5AM, but recently I've found that I'll naturally wake up between 2-4AM at which point I'll drift in and out of consciousness having negative, vivid dreams that I partially remember in the morning.
For a long time now, I've been kinda self-experimenting on inducing these kinds of states in myself, without resorting to hardware or hard/scary drugs.
It all started with my realization that sleep brought me answers in general; i.e. a realization that my general pattern was to work on hard problems all day until I hit various brick walls, then step away and do Real Life and then later at night I'd Sleep, and then often if I'm lucky I wake up the next morning with important realizations that get me past the previous day's brick walls, and then the cycle repeats.
Once I realized this pattern, I started optimizing for more sleep cycles per day and a more-immediate transition from BrickWalls->Sleep, basically by injecting a daytime nap in the midst of my workday if/when I can (working from home has its privileges!), aiming for ~1.5h or ~3h nap increments when I can, since that seems to match well with my sleep cycles for reaching REM in the middle and then waking back out of it on a natural cycle boundary.
I'm also a heavy coffee drinker for the stimulant effects on my thinking, and at one point heard about the "Coffee Nap" idea (TL;DR - it takes ~30m for caffeine to really kick in, so when you get tired you chug a coffee and lay down, and let yourself wake later as it kicks in).
Somehow over time all my random experimentation on these various inter-related things settled into a new pattern that works well when I can achieve it: I try to hit the brick wall while still fairly amped on caffeine (have a last cup as I'm moving away from the laptop if I'm behind on my caffeine intake), then switch over to a nap state.
As I'm laying in bed falling asleep, I initially force my thoughts on whatever my Brick Walls are, and my body's still a bit uncomfortably caffeine amped/buzzed for laying down and trying to sleep, but between the coffee buzzing and the descent into sleep, I now usually end up having a very odd transitional but semi-conscious mental state for a solid 10-15 minutes (sometimes longer) on my way to sleep. During this time, free associations and strange dreamy unrelated things start springboarding out from my initial more-directed thoughts, and it's clear this is basically an open channel to get those lateral-thinking associations going while still barely conscious. It's like a psychedelic-drug-free version of a short acid trip or useful lucid dreaming state. Eventually I succumb to sleep, but I have had a very good success rate (relatively - it's still not necessarily high in the absolute!) at getting good intuitive answers to my problems on waking.
Over time I've gotten better and better at achieving these states with practice, but it still requires a lot of these triggering conditions/patterns above. I think/hope eventually I may reach a point where I can induce these mental states at will without actually going to sleep afterwards or relying on caffeine buzz to kick it off.
I recently read "A mind for numbers" which leans on this concept of working hard on a problem (focus mode) and then stepping away from it for some time (diffuse mode) very heavily. I also realized that this works really well for me and i guess for most people.
I've relied on this for decades for complex development tasks. Now when a manager asks me to propose some design solution, I just say flat out that I'll probably know what to do after a couple of sleeps.
