Hypnagogic Visions

One of the most obvious exceptions to “absence” in sleep is the fact that we have dreams. Not that we’re aware of dreaming; when that awareness comes, we’re soon awake again. Dreams are a huge subject, so I’d like merely to crack the door today and talk about what seems to me a closely related subject, hypnagogic visions.

Some people have them, some claim they never do. Let me give a simple example of what for me are relatively common experiences (once every other month). I’m going to sleep, eyes closed. What I actually see is darkness, perhaps some moving, disappearing points of tiny light. Not infrequently the splotchy background may feature flickering phenomena with geometrical or other flow­ing, swirling, colored designs. Images or hints of faces, figures, masks, and other weird stuff may appear. This is the stuff I usually see before I’m out and gone. Sometimes the light increases markedly—and a scene appears. Yet I’m still awake. The state of attention here is very important. It must remain present, and with it knowledge that I’m actually watching. But the emotions must be very calm or else the scene will vanish and I’ll be hard-awake rather than mild-awake—in a manner of speaking. If all goes well I’ll soon find myself in motion, but not as in a body but as a consciousness at eye-level roughly. The motion is involuntary, and stopping or redirecting it is enormously difficult, but not impossible. As the effort increases, the scene begins to dim. The scenery can be quite ordinary (landscapes, farm scenes, urban scenes) and occasionally quite fantastic (out-of-this world architecture). Sometimes I see people, sometimes quite large numbers. Such visions, however, rapidly become dreams and—on awakening—I remember a dream-like progression as the last thing.

Here is an actual vision, one of the more recent; in this one, and others that follow, I emphasize that I was fully self-conscious throughout:

The vision was not exactly dramatic. I was staring into a wet gutter; it seemed to be raining. My awareness seemed blocked to left and right by walls. I had the most extraordinary trouble moving forward. The gutter-vision was quite static. I strained intensely trying move forward and to my left (to look around the wall) but couldn’t. After quite a long time movement began spontaneously. The gutter and the left wall itself began to move forward together, me with them. As this happened a dark vista opened behind me, to my left side. There I saw what seemed to be a much lower wall. Next I rose higher and looked into a garden beyond it, as it were—but all in black, barely visible, yet I felt the forms of fancy bushes and flower-beds inside it. The darkness had been caused by my efforts to move. Beyond the garden rose a vast structure in the center of which I saw a quite outlandish and faintly shiny huge figure of an ogre-like giant—but not a living creature but, rather, a vast decoration on the face of the building that fronted on the garden. My last memory of this vision is my looking up at this shiny but black figure. Then I was gone.

Such visions are routinely described as hallucinations. Hallucinations are thought to be imaginary visions; the word itself comes from the Greek to “wander in the mind.” Note, please, “in the mind”—rather than in a real place. Simply accepting such a characterization seems to me too easy—unless someone has a much better explanation of what imagination really is and how it works. Among my hypnagogic visions was one where, in an outdoor scene, I “climbed” a berm of dirt topped by a wire fence. Looking over it and down a very short distance, I saw a huge herd of elephants all moving in excitement from the left hand to the right inside a kind of gully. Imagination? The scene was totally realistic; the elephants looked very real, very dusty, quite alarmed. I hadn’t heard the slightest sound, not before, not as they were rushing by. Some of my visions showed me architecture so strikingly novel the structures were literally out of this world—meaning quite discernibly products of mind, but not, repeat not, mine. Among my vision, on the other hand, are urban scenes or vistas of quite recognizable modern forms, not at all surprising even if strangely vivid. It seems to me at least equally plausible to hypothesize that the settings of hypnagogic visions are actually real places, some in our own dimension and some in others. Our presence in them, however, is in out-of-body states. How we enter them, why these rather than those, why today but not tomorrow, and by what paths or venues we get there, that remains a mystery.

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My limited experience isn’t much to go on, but some things I note for future exploration. Hypnagogic visions have dream-like settings. They differ from dreams in an important regard: the consciousness is not dreamlike. Another way to put this is that one can evidently experience dream-like visions in conscious states.