On your journey to remember or understand your dreams, you may have realized that there are more than just two states — awake or asleep — and that along the spectrum of alertness there are states in which you are not quite asleep and yet not quite awake in which unsolicited images or perceptions arise.
If you are moving from awake to asleep, this state is referred to as hypnagogia. If you are transitioning from asleep to awake, this state is referred to as hypnopompia. However, I would suggest that we maintain the perspective that consciousness is a continuum and that our experience along the continuum provides us with interesting settings for noticing perceptual awareness in varying states.
For ease, I’ll use hypnagogic and hypnopompic in this article, but consider that there are other relaxed or meditative states that may also alter our awareness and perception; ie. watching the waves crash on the beach, being inside a drum circle, chanting, rocking back and forth in a rocking chair, making art, swaying to repetitive music, etc.
Often, when you start paying more attention to dreams and realize the benefits of remembering your dreams, you want to change your schedule and lifestyle so that you are better set up to dream and remember dreams. This may involve guarding your sleep, sleeping longer, quietly relaxing before bedtime, sleeping in a darkened space, staying in bed after the alarm goes off, dream journaling, returning to your dream journal later in the day to contemplate dream images or feelings, or even taking naps during the day. As we become more mindful of sleep and dreams — and spend more time in the in-between states, we also start to notice things we may not have noticed before.
One thing you may become aware of are perceptions that float up into your awareness, often very briefly, as you are falling asleep (hypnagogia). Most people report these as visual perceptions, some as auditory. You may get a brief flash of a personal memory — seemingly random. You may see a person’s face, someone you don’t know. You may get a phrase or a word. You may hear a sound that does not come from the external environment, but still sounds loud and clear.
Sometimes you may only get a feeling, without any perception. Sometimes you may have the experience of remembering something without knowing what it is you remembered.
It can be a very, very strange experience at first. It can also feel frustrating — a feeling without a memory? A memory without a perception? How is that possible?
My own perceptions and experiences in the hypnagogic state have really challenged my beliefs about memory, feeling, and perception. I have received precognitive images in these states. I have heard people talking in clear conversation when there is no one else in the room. I have seen vivid scenes of moments from my past I had completely forgotten. I have been profoundly moved by a flash of a memory that I can’t recall. All this came unprovoked, simply via laying down in a quiet, dark room to go to sleep or nap (and also during acupuncture sessions.) What are these sense impressions, feelings, and memories? Where (or when) are they coming from? For me, sense impressions in this state land differently than the ones in waking life or the ones I remember when I wake from dreams. They are more mysterious. They are difficult to make sense of. They are fragmented and non-linear. Often times, they don’t seem to be relevant to me or about me. How then, or why, are they coming to me?
My persistence and willingness to allow these strange experiences into my life with curiosity and patience has been an interesting journey in and of itself; and in some ways has even proven fruitful. Through a slow and careful study of various types of in-between states, I have become more adept at maintaining them and observing them. I seem to be able to “stay” in them longer, by choice. Mystical experiences aside, doing so has increased my own body awareness: I notice internal sensations in these relaxed states I don’t typically notice. I have figured out how to temporarily be in two different states of awareness at once: both experiencer and observer. On occasion, during hypnogogic states I access what I have in other articles referred to as “the hidden“, but more commonly known as ESP.
Additionally, while I am not a practitioner of lucid dreaming (though I enjoy experiencing and studying my spontaneous lucid dreams), I have found that the hypnopompic state is when I am more likely to spontaneously lucid dream. For me, this typically involves waking up in the early morning (like 5am) to use the bathroom, and going back to sleep. During the hours and dreams that follow, I seem more likely to recognize I am dreaming and become lucid in the dream. I also learned that what I was doing on my own in trying to observe the hypnagogic state is actually a method of lucid dreaming induction referred to as WILD (Wake-initiated Lucid Dream). You can find many resources online for inducing lucid dreaming this way, but basically the practice starts off with intentionally getting more familiar with the hypnogogic state, as I’ve been writing about here: relaxing, but maintaining awareness while falling into a deeper state of consciousness. Â
I prefer exploring the hypnagogic state without any expectations beyond my own desire to experience whatever it has to offer me in that moment. But if you are interested in lucid dreaming, you might want to look more into WILD, and spend more intentional time in hypnagogic or hypnopompic states. Same goes for those of you looking to explore astral projection and out-of-body experiences.
For dreamers who are interested in mystical practices, learning how to maintain an observer awareness in a relaxed state, while simultaneously letting go enough for external images to arise, is a nonordinary state and useful to our transpersonal work.
For those who are struggling to remember dreams, hypnagogia can provide images that can kick off a dream journaling practice. Write those images and feelings down! When I start to work with dreamers who struggle to recall dreams, I offer them the option of simply trying to lay down or nap and see if fragments of images arise for them more easily in those states. We can work with those images, too.
