Theorizing: The Transition to Sleep

It seems to me that we may live our lives close to another kind of world, a more subtle one; but that world feels and looks much like our own. It may well be that we visit that realm in sleep—in deep rather than in REM sleep. Here is the speculation. We don’t remember our time in deep sleep because, while we are in bodies, what we remember must be stored using the brain’s intermediation. When the brain falls asleep, it stops storing experiences. At the same time, when the brain is awake, its noisy functioning prevents our linking to the more subtle memories in the state we inhabit during deep sleep. This view requires the idea that memories are not stored in tissue but in something like Sheldrake’s morphic fields.

The simple rule here is that we must be at least half-awake to form reliably retrievable memories while we’re in bodies. We are therefore half-awake when we dream; rapid eye movements (REM) attest to this fact. In transition to sleep, when hypnagogic vision sometimes briefly occur, the brain is still active enough to make a record the experience; but it is then in the process of shutting down its memory-storing activity. Therefore we only remember the beginnings of these visions. Those who remember them in toto have found the trick of keeping the brain minimally awake—minimally because, otherwise, the visions would be inaccessible. I’ll try to say more about this point.

I imagine the mechanics of this process as follows. Even to glimpse the subtle realm, the physical state must be in neutral; it cannot be very active. Under normal circumstances, thus ignoring special practices like meditation, we reach this quiet state only at the time when we’re going to sleep. I’ve noticed the following sequence.

1. I close my eyes and see a sort of darkness. It is not a uniform black totality; rather, it is darkness with patterns. In nine cases out of ten, after a brief period in this state sleep takes me away. Most instances of falling asleep never proceed past this stage.
2. If I maintain a kind of observant alertness during the first phase of darkness, I begin to perceive more and different patters. The new patterns are only minimally visual but they will have mental shapes. I signal that by putting the word “see” in quotes. Something suggests faces or figures, motions or moving patterns. The faces “seen” are not really made of light; they are more felt—but they’re also quite distinct. The same holds for whatever else I “see.” The darkness appears to be “populated.” Sometimes these patterns produce quite unpleasant visions, minimally vulgar, sometimes funny, sometimes violent. Ignoring these—sometimes willfully ignoring them—brings about the next phase.
3. In this, the third phase, I perceive dim light. It appears as a graying out of the darkness on the periphery of what we would call vision; sometimes it is ahead. A dim sense of light grey will then develop more luminosity. These patches may also have shapes, but not of any object—just bits of cloud or a circular shape.
4. Finally, and invariably startling me, the blackness abruptly vanishes. It is replaced by a panorama of vivid reality—usually outdoor scenes, landscapes, skyscapes, trees. This vision may also feature built-up structures, animals, people. The startling nature of this vision invariably, in my case, brings me awake. But as I’m shocked, as I’m surprised into awareness, the vision instantly disappears. And it is precisely this “awakening” that makes me realize that, a moment before, I was almost entirely detached from my physical surroundings, thus my awareness lying in bed with my eyes closed. That feeling had retreated far into the background, the attention entirely on the vision—be it of darkness, patterns, or dim light.
5. Now, curiously, this brief last stage of awakening also rapidly disappears. Vivid images return but, this time, more dimly defined, almost as if behind a thin veil; and, my attention being drawn by them, they are the last thing I hazily remember.

One more note on the first two phases. If thoughts are flowing during the first stage and are not stopped, they will transform into dream snippets and carry me away. Similarly, in the second state, if I permit the images to rouse me to mental commentary, I will become more awake, interrupting the process. To cause this sequence to take place, I therefore stop my associative mentation by focusing attention on simply seeing the bits of darkness in phase 1 or “seeing” the images in phase 2 without mental commentary.

All of this leads me to conclude that physical existence, including ordinary mentation, causes a great deal of noise. It comes from the body itself and from the brain’s activity as it perceives physical reality. As this noise diminishes, awareness of a subtler world emerges. But so long as the brain is still active enough to store memories, it will record what I perceive. And, I would emphasize, it also reacts to the appearance of these phenomena. If these are incongruous—like the startling appearance of a stunningly real landscape—they surprise the brain. In response it activates the body to a higher state of alertness. And that very alertness then breaks (interrupts, interferes with) the subtle perception.

All of the above illustrates that to make sense of this sequence of events requires various theoretical underpinnings which cannot be independently checked by third parties. I’m well aware of the fact that most people don’t experience this sort of thing frequently enough (if at all) to build what might be called a data base. I’ve had this experience many times before; therefore it makes me curious, indeed it all this fascinates me.

Now as for dreams, I’ve discussed those at various points in this blog at length. To provide a summary, I think dreams are the equivalent of waking-thought but experienced in half-awake states; and because those states are more primitive, as it were, the thoughts are rendered into animal forms: they’re translated into images. As the body comes awake, the first thoughts might, indeed, be about the visions the soul sees in the other world; or they may simply be memories last stored before going to sleep.

Phenomenon - More Notes

That word, phenomenon, has come to be associated with the purely physical in the eighteenth century when Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) made a sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena, the appearances of things (die Erscheinungen) and things-in-themselves (die Dinge-an-Sich). We only have access to phenomena, Kant taught, and that by means of the five physical senses. Noumena are inaccessible to us, utterly unknowable. He thus split reality in two. Nothing is accessible to us except by the senses, but what the senses tell us has a kind of mysterious and hard reality behind it.

This illustrates the way philosophers can influence perception—especially those philosophers who are lifted into prominence, a social process actually. The word he used for thing-in-itself, noumenon, in the Greek once meant either “thing perceived” or “what is known.” The linkage implied between perception and knowledge in this word is not emphasized in that other Greek word, phenomenon, “that which appears.” But that which is perceived is certainly that which appears. Hence Kant’s exploitation of the word had an intention: he used the second sense of noumenon and restricted the word phenomenon to the first meaning of noumenon. In the Greek they are equivalent, but one carries more emphasis on knowledge.

But is there any legitimacy in thinking that phenomena hide something utterly inaccessible? And how then do we deal with perceptions in which vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are not genuinely present? Such is certainly the case in hypnagogic visions, for instance, of which I mentioned one the other day here and have discussed the subject at greater length here. Is vision with eyes closed some as yet undiscovered sixth sense?

This subject is important for a reason. Our current bias to narrow the meaning of the word phenomenon to the senses absolutely forces us to regard any other experience, however real it is, to the region of illusion. This served the spirit of the enlightenment and the succeeding era of materialism very well. A consequence of this has been that we’ve marked as Off Limits an extensive range of reality with possibly very serious consequences. I’ll expand on that as the New Year takes hold and starts to run.

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.