Hypnagogic States
Hypnagogic States
posted 11th Oct
I was curious if anyone has ever experienced this and if u feel comfortable giving details. I personally have since I was 17 in addition to sleep paralysis. Most people I have met and discussed this with have not experienced this. Just curious as to how many have u and what your experiences have been like.
quoteI live in Texas
584 posts
3836 postsposted 11th Oct
its the cure!
and isnt a hypnagogic state the place between sleeping and not sleeping?
quoteand isnt a hypnagogic state the place between sleeping and not sleeping?
I have 1 child & live in Buffalo Grove, Illinois
posted 11th Oct
the cure? uh....what?
Sometimes the word hypnagogia is used in a restricted sense to refer to the onset of sleep, and contrasted with hypnopompia, Fredierick Myers’ term for waking up.[3] However, hypnagogia is also regularly employed in a more general sense that covers both falling asleep and waking up, and Havelock Ellis questioned the need for separate terms.[4] Indeed, it is not always possible in practice to assign a particular episode of any given phenomenon to one or the other, given that the same kinds of experience occur in both, and that people may drift in and out of sleep. In this article hypnagogia will be used in the broader sense, unless otherwise stated or implied.
Other terms for hypnagogia, in one or both senses, that have been proposed include ‘presomnal’ or ‘anthypnic sensations’, ‘visions of half-sleep’, ‘oneirogogic images’ and ‘phantasmata’,[5], ‘the borderland of sleep’, ‘praedormitium’,[6] the ‘borderland state’, ‘half-dream state’, ‘pre-dream condition’[7] ‘sleep onset dreams’,[8] dreamlets,[9] and ‘wakefulness-sleep transition’ state (WST).[10]
[edit] History
Early references to hypnagogia are to be found in the writings of Aristotle, Iamblichus, Cardano, Simon Forman and Swedenborg.[11] Romanticism brought a renewed interest in the subjective experience of the edges of sleep.[12] In more recent centuries, many authors have referred to the state; Edgar Allan Poe, for example, wrote of the ‘fancies’ he experienced “only when I am on the brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so.”[13]
Serious scientific enquiry began in the 19th century with Johannes Peter Müller, Jules Baillarger and Alfred Maury, and continued into the twentieth with Leroy.[14]
The advent of electroencephalography has allowed the introspective methods of these early researchers to be supplemented with physiological data. The search for neural correlates for hypnagogic imagery began with Davis et al. in the 1930s,[15] and continues with increasing sophistication to this day. While the dominance of the behavourist paradigm led to a decline in research, especially in the English speaking world, the later 20th century has seen a revival, with investigations of hypnagogia and related ASCs playing an important role in the emerging multidisciplinary study of consciousness.[16][17] Nevertheless, much remains to be understood about the experience and its corresponding neurology, and the topic has been somewhat neglected in comparison with sleep and dreams; hypnagogia has been described as a “well-trodden and yet unmapped territory.”[18]
Important reviews of the scientific literature have been made by Leaning,[19] Schacter, [20] Richardson and Mavromatis.[21]
[edit] Sensory phenomena
Transition to and from sleep may be attended by a wide variety of sensory experiences. These can occur in any modality, individually or combined, and range from the vague and barely perceptible to vivid hallucinations.[22]
[edit] Sights
Among the more commonly reported,[23][24] and more thoroughly researched, sensory features of hypnagogia are phosphenes which can manifest as seemingly random speckles, lines or geometrical patterns, including form constants, or as figurative (representational) images. They may be monochromatic or richly coloured, still or moving, flat or three-dimensional (offering an impression of perspective). Individual images are typically fleeting and given to very rapid changes. They are said to differ from dreams proper in that hypnagogic imagery is usually static and lacking in narrative content,[25] although others understand the state rather as a gradual transition from hypnagogia to fragmentary dreams,[26] i.e. from simple ‘eigenlicht’ to whole imagined scenes. Hypnagogia can be induced with a Dreamachine, which uses a pulsing frequency of light close to alpha waves to create this effect. Descriptions of exceptionally vivid and elaborate hypnagogic visuals can be found in the work of Marie-Jean-Léon, Marquis d'Hervey de Saint Denys.
[edit] The ‘Tetris Effect’
People who have spent a long time at some repetitive activity before sleep, in particular one that is new to them, may find that it dominates their imagery as they grow drowsy, a tendency dubbed the Tetris effect. This effect has even been observed in amnesiacs who otherwise have no memory of the original activity.[27] When the activity involves moving objects, as in the computer game Tetris, the corresponding hypnagogic images too tend to be perceived as moving. The Tetris effect is not confined to visual imagery, but can manifest in other modalities also. For example, Robert Stickgold recounts having experienced the touch of rocks while falling asleep after mountain climbing.[28] This can also occur if people swim in waves shortly before going to bed, and "feel" the waves as they drift to sleep.
[edit] Sounds
Hypnagogic imagery is often auditory or has an auditory component. Like the visuals, hypnagogic sounds vary in intensity from faint impressions to loud noises, such as crashes and bangs (exploding head syndrome). People may imagine their own name called or a doorbell ringing. Snatches of imagined speech are common. While typically nonsensical and fragmented, these speech events can occasionally strike the individual as apt comments on – or summations of – their thoughts at the time. They often contain wordplay, neologisms and made-up names. Hypnagogic speech may manifest as the subject’s own ‘inner voice’, or as the voices of others: familiar people or strangers. More rarely, poetry or music is heard.[29]
[edit] Sleep paralysis
Humming, roaring, hissing, rushing and buzzing noises are frequent in conjunction with sleep paralysis (SP). This happens when the REM atonia sets in sooner than usual, before the person is fully asleep, or persists longer than usual, after the person has (in other respects) fully awoken.[30] SP is reportedly very frequent among narcoleptics. It occurs frequently in about 6% of the rest of the population, and occurs occasionally in 60%.[31] In surveys from Canada, China, England, Japan and Nigeria, 20 to 60% of individuals reported having experienced SP at least once in their lifetime.[32][33] The paralysis itself is frequently accompanied by additional phenomena. Typical examples include a feeling of being crushed or suffocated, electric ‘tingles’ or ‘vibrations’, imagined speech and other noises, the imagined presence of a visible or invisible entity, and sometimes intense emotion: fear or euphoria and orgasmic feelings.[34][35] SP has been proposed as an explanation for at least some alien abduction experiences.[36]
[edit] Other sensations
Gustatory, olfactory and thermal sensations in hypnagogia have all been reported, as well as tactile sensations (including those kinds classed as paraesthesia or formication). Sometimes there is synaesthesia; many people report seeing a flash of light or some other visual image in response to a real sound. Proprioceptive effects may be noticed, with numbness and changes in perceived body size and proportions,[37] feelings of floating or bobbing, and out-of-body experiences.[38] Perhaps the most common experience of this kind is the falling sensation, and associated hypnic jerk, encountered by many people, at least occasionally, while drifting off to sleep.[39]
[edit] Subjective interpretation
Hypnagogic phenomena may be interpreted as visions, prophesies, premonitions, apparitions and inspiration (artistic or divine), depending on the experiencer’s beliefs and those of their culture.
[edit] Cognitive and affective phenomena
[edit] Receptivity and suggestibility
Thought processes on the edge of sleep tend to differ radically from those of ordinary wakefulness. Hypnagogia may involve a “loosening of ego boundaries ... openness, sensitivity, internalization-subjectification of the physical and mental environment (empathy) and diffuse-absorbed attention,”[40] Hypnagogic cognition, in comparison with that of normal, alert wakefulness, is characterised by heightened suggestibility,[41] illogic and a fluid association of ideas. Subjects are more receptive in the hypnagogic state to suggestion from an experimenter than at other times, and readily incorporate external stimuli into hypnagogic trains of thought and subsequent dreams. This receptivity has a physiological parallel; EEG readings show elevated responsiveness to sound around the onset of sleep.[42]
[edit] Autosymbolism
Herbert Silberer described a process he called autosymbolism, whereby hypnagogic hallucinations seem to represent, without repression or censorship, whatever one is thinking at the time, turning abstract ideas into a concrete image, which may be perceived as an apt and succinct representation thereof.[43]
[edit] Insight
This process can even lead to genuine insight into a problem, a well known example being the story of August Kekulé’s discovery of the structure of benzene. Similarly, the teenaged Karl Gauss obtained an insight during a hypnagogic reverie into how to construct a 17-sided polygon. Many other artists, writers, scientists and inventors – including Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Walter Scott, Thomas Edison and Isaac Newton – have credited hypnagogia and related states with enhancing their creativity.[44] A widely cited instance of what could well be this phenomenon is the story of the composition of the Devil's Trill violin sonata by Giuseppe Tartini. Tartini dreamt that the devil appeared at the end of his bed and played the violin with otherwordly mastery. Tartini woke and immediately began writing the virtuoso music down, though managed only to transcribe what he painfully felt to be a massively inferior version of what he had heard in his sleep; incidentally, such loss of memory of the dreamt events is a common circumstance of dreams.
[edit] Amnesia
quoteSometimes the word hypnagogia is used in a restricted sense to refer to the onset of sleep, and contrasted with hypnopompia, Fredierick Myers’ term for waking up.[3] However, hypnagogia is also regularly employed in a more general sense that covers both falling asleep and waking up, and Havelock Ellis questioned the need for separate terms.[4] Indeed, it is not always possible in practice to assign a particular episode of any given phenomenon to one or the other, given that the same kinds of experience occur in both, and that people may drift in and out of sleep. In this article hypnagogia will be used in the broader sense, unless otherwise stated or implied.
Other terms for hypnagogia, in one or both senses, that have been proposed include ‘presomnal’ or ‘anthypnic sensations’, ‘visions of half-sleep’, ‘oneirogogic images’ and ‘phantasmata’,[5], ‘the borderland of sleep’, ‘praedormitium’,[6] the ‘borderland state’, ‘half-dream state’, ‘pre-dream condition’[7] ‘sleep onset dreams’,[8] dreamlets,[9] and ‘wakefulness-sleep transition’ state (WST).[10]
[edit] History
Early references to hypnagogia are to be found in the writings of Aristotle, Iamblichus, Cardano, Simon Forman and Swedenborg.[11] Romanticism brought a renewed interest in the subjective experience of the edges of sleep.[12] In more recent centuries, many authors have referred to the state; Edgar Allan Poe, for example, wrote of the ‘fancies’ he experienced “only when I am on the brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so.”[13]
Serious scientific enquiry began in the 19th century with Johannes Peter Müller, Jules Baillarger and Alfred Maury, and continued into the twentieth with Leroy.[14]
The advent of electroencephalography has allowed the introspective methods of these early researchers to be supplemented with physiological data. The search for neural correlates for hypnagogic imagery began with Davis et al. in the 1930s,[15] and continues with increasing sophistication to this day. While the dominance of the behavourist paradigm led to a decline in research, especially in the English speaking world, the later 20th century has seen a revival, with investigations of hypnagogia and related ASCs playing an important role in the emerging multidisciplinary study of consciousness.[16][17] Nevertheless, much remains to be understood about the experience and its corresponding neurology, and the topic has been somewhat neglected in comparison with sleep and dreams; hypnagogia has been described as a “well-trodden and yet unmapped territory.”[18]
Important reviews of the scientific literature have been made by Leaning,[19] Schacter, [20] Richardson and Mavromatis.[21]
[edit] Sensory phenomena
Transition to and from sleep may be attended by a wide variety of sensory experiences. These can occur in any modality, individually or combined, and range from the vague and barely perceptible to vivid hallucinations.[22]
[edit] Sights
Among the more commonly reported,[23][24] and more thoroughly researched, sensory features of hypnagogia are phosphenes which can manifest as seemingly random speckles, lines or geometrical patterns, including form constants, or as figurative (representational) images. They may be monochromatic or richly coloured, still or moving, flat or three-dimensional (offering an impression of perspective). Individual images are typically fleeting and given to very rapid changes. They are said to differ from dreams proper in that hypnagogic imagery is usually static and lacking in narrative content,[25] although others understand the state rather as a gradual transition from hypnagogia to fragmentary dreams,[26] i.e. from simple ‘eigenlicht’ to whole imagined scenes. Hypnagogia can be induced with a Dreamachine, which uses a pulsing frequency of light close to alpha waves to create this effect. Descriptions of exceptionally vivid and elaborate hypnagogic visuals can be found in the work of Marie-Jean-Léon, Marquis d'Hervey de Saint Denys.
[edit] The ‘Tetris Effect’
People who have spent a long time at some repetitive activity before sleep, in particular one that is new to them, may find that it dominates their imagery as they grow drowsy, a tendency dubbed the Tetris effect. This effect has even been observed in amnesiacs who otherwise have no memory of the original activity.[27] When the activity involves moving objects, as in the computer game Tetris, the corresponding hypnagogic images too tend to be perceived as moving. The Tetris effect is not confined to visual imagery, but can manifest in other modalities also. For example, Robert Stickgold recounts having experienced the touch of rocks while falling asleep after mountain climbing.[28] This can also occur if people swim in waves shortly before going to bed, and "feel" the waves as they drift to sleep.
[edit] Sounds
Hypnagogic imagery is often auditory or has an auditory component. Like the visuals, hypnagogic sounds vary in intensity from faint impressions to loud noises, such as crashes and bangs (exploding head syndrome). People may imagine their own name called or a doorbell ringing. Snatches of imagined speech are common. While typically nonsensical and fragmented, these speech events can occasionally strike the individual as apt comments on – or summations of – their thoughts at the time. They often contain wordplay, neologisms and made-up names. Hypnagogic speech may manifest as the subject’s own ‘inner voice’, or as the voices of others: familiar people or strangers. More rarely, poetry or music is heard.[29]
[edit] Sleep paralysis
Humming, roaring, hissing, rushing and buzzing noises are frequent in conjunction with sleep paralysis (SP). This happens when the REM atonia sets in sooner than usual, before the person is fully asleep, or persists longer than usual, after the person has (in other respects) fully awoken.[30] SP is reportedly very frequent among narcoleptics. It occurs frequently in about 6% of the rest of the population, and occurs occasionally in 60%.[31] In surveys from Canada, China, England, Japan and Nigeria, 20 to 60% of individuals reported having experienced SP at least once in their lifetime.[32][33] The paralysis itself is frequently accompanied by additional phenomena. Typical examples include a feeling of being crushed or suffocated, electric ‘tingles’ or ‘vibrations’, imagined speech and other noises, the imagined presence of a visible or invisible entity, and sometimes intense emotion: fear or euphoria and orgasmic feelings.[34][35] SP has been proposed as an explanation for at least some alien abduction experiences.[36]
[edit] Other sensations
Gustatory, olfactory and thermal sensations in hypnagogia have all been reported, as well as tactile sensations (including those kinds classed as paraesthesia or formication). Sometimes there is synaesthesia; many people report seeing a flash of light or some other visual image in response to a real sound. Proprioceptive effects may be noticed, with numbness and changes in perceived body size and proportions,[37] feelings of floating or bobbing, and out-of-body experiences.[38] Perhaps the most common experience of this kind is the falling sensation, and associated hypnic jerk, encountered by many people, at least occasionally, while drifting off to sleep.[39]
[edit] Subjective interpretation
Hypnagogic phenomena may be interpreted as visions, prophesies, premonitions, apparitions and inspiration (artistic or divine), depending on the experiencer’s beliefs and those of their culture.
[edit] Cognitive and affective phenomena
[edit] Receptivity and suggestibility
Thought processes on the edge of sleep tend to differ radically from those of ordinary wakefulness. Hypnagogia may involve a “loosening of ego boundaries ... openness, sensitivity, internalization-subjectification of the physical and mental environment (empathy) and diffuse-absorbed attention,”[40] Hypnagogic cognition, in comparison with that of normal, alert wakefulness, is characterised by heightened suggestibility,[41] illogic and a fluid association of ideas. Subjects are more receptive in the hypnagogic state to suggestion from an experimenter than at other times, and readily incorporate external stimuli into hypnagogic trains of thought and subsequent dreams. This receptivity has a physiological parallel; EEG readings show elevated responsiveness to sound around the onset of sleep.[42]
[edit] Autosymbolism
Herbert Silberer described a process he called autosymbolism, whereby hypnagogic hallucinations seem to represent, without repression or censorship, whatever one is thinking at the time, turning abstract ideas into a concrete image, which may be perceived as an apt and succinct representation thereof.[43]
[edit] Insight
This process can even lead to genuine insight into a problem, a well known example being the story of August Kekulé’s discovery of the structure of benzene. Similarly, the teenaged Karl Gauss obtained an insight during a hypnagogic reverie into how to construct a 17-sided polygon. Many other artists, writers, scientists and inventors – including Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Walter Scott, Thomas Edison and Isaac Newton – have credited hypnagogia and related states with enhancing their creativity.[44] A widely cited instance of what could well be this phenomenon is the story of the composition of the Devil's Trill violin sonata by Giuseppe Tartini. Tartini dreamt that the devil appeared at the end of his bed and played the violin with otherwordly mastery. Tartini woke and immediately began writing the virtuoso music down, though managed only to transcribe what he painfully felt to be a massively inferior version of what he had heard in his sleep; incidentally, such loss of memory of the dreamt events is a common circumstance of dreams.
[edit] Amnesia
I live in Texas
posted 11th Oct
the cure the band..
i don't think i have.. occasionally ill be almost sleeping and have these freaky real dream like things.. like yesterday for instance.. i saw some horrid things and heard clear as day my husband screaming my name... i immediately called him at work and he was fine.. but i swear it was real.
quotei don't think i have.. occasionally ill be almost sleeping and have these freaky real dream like things.. like yesterday for instance.. i saw some horrid things and heard clear as day my husband screaming my name... i immediately called him at work and he was fine.. but i swear it was real.
I have 1 child & live in Buffalo Grove, Illinois
posted 11th Oct
That could have been hypnagogic....did u notice any vibratory effects going through ur body or feel paralysis in ur limbs when this occured?
How is that related to The Cure?The way they play with the subconscious?I love them to death ...they are in my top 3 favorite bands of all time ..the other two being Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd....
quoteHow is that related to The Cure?The way they play with the subconscious?I love them to death ...they are in my top 3 favorite bands of all time ..the other two being Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd....
I live in Texas
posted 11th Oct
Quoting disturbedplanet:“ That could have been hypnagogic....did u notice any vibratory effects going through ur body or feel paralysis ... [snip!] ... love them to death ...they are in my top 3 favorite bands of all time ..the other two being Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd....”
lol, no the cure have an ep called hypnagogic state..
and not that time.. i have been paralyzed once.. and i thought i was dreaming and things were falling on me like bottles and it was like i was on acid.. but a baaaad trip. and i was scared shitless and i couldnt move... so i decided to spit on the floor and if it was there when i woke up i would know it was real.. and lo and behold there was spit on my floor in the morning..
that was a time when i was battling extreme anxiety and depression.. i havent had any of those since ive been treated..
ETA i could sit up.. but i couldnt move my legs.. and my therapist at the time told me that was because i had blankets over my legs.. ?? lol.
I have 1 child & live in Buffalo Grove, Illinois
posted 11th Oct
sorry to cut this short but i gotta go .....I'll be back to discuss this with u mary...later
quoteI live in Texas
posted 11th Oct
Quoting disturbedplanet:“ what's an ep?”
extended play record.
I have 1 child & live in Buffalo Grove, Illinois
posted 12th Oct
oh cool...its weird how i havent heard of it but then again I cant say I know and heard every single song of theirs...they have tons! But I have to say the Pornography album is my favorite......That's one badass album.. I cant believe that came out so early in their career.
quoteI live in Texas
posted 12th Oct
yeah what u described sounds similar to some of the things i've been through it that state. I always get both simultaneously...hynagogic aspects along with the paralysis. I also get the auditory effects. I have heard banging, the calling of my name, my brother and dad calling me from outside, screeching across my tile in my kitchen, my brother talking right by me but senselessly.....I have also seen alot of weird ass shit. I think that when one is in that state, your perception is on a certain level that exists between being fully awake and semi-asleep...and ur able to percieve things, paranormal things, that are always there but are not aware of in normal everday life. If u read that whole description, they try to narrow it down to the brain and ur own brain chemicals creating those effects. I do not believe it's all you and your brain. I believe that there are entities and other paranormal things that exist on that level and that one is able to percieve them when in that hypnagogic state of awareness.
quoteI live in Texas
680 postsposted 20th Oct
Quoting disturbedplanet:“ yeah what u described sounds similar to some of the things i've been through it that state. I always ... [snip!] ... paranormal things that exist on that level and that one is able to percieve them when in that hypnagogic state of awareness.”
wow..thats never happened to me, but its really interesting!
I have 2 kids & live in Kentucky
posted 20th Oct
yeah it's also very very scary!!! I had one just last nite actually... I always hear stuff when in that state...it's real tripped out
quoteI live in Texas
posted 20th Oct
Quoting disturbedplanet:“ yeah it's also very very scary!!! I had one just last nite actually... I always hear stuff when in that state...it's real tripped out”
I can imagine it is! How long does it normally last for? so you cant wake yourself out of it? im guessing not...that would freak me out
I have 2 kids & live in Kentucky
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