Thread: Hypnanthology

I've felt being pushed upon waking up and I've felt my bed sinking into the floor.

I've heard loud explosions and I've heard the ringing in my ears become louder than normal.

I've seen numbers/text and I've seen images from the dream remain after waking up and opening my eyes.

I've had the feeling of slipping out of bed but haven't had the pleasure (or displeasure?) of my bed sinking into the floor. What is that like? I hear the explosions or huge bangs sometimes which sends me into a mini panic attack but typically I hear someone call my name or a knocking prior to sleep. I've also experienced the dream image remaining after I open my eyes. Now that's some trippy stuff, eyes wide open yet still seeing the dream. Makes me wonder what our brains are doing at these times.

Originally Posted by Methos

bed sinking into the floor. What is that like?

Pretty creepy! It took me be surprise because it occurred without any prior sleep a few minutes after going to bed. It's like a slow, downward acceleration with a loss of feeling of stability. I hate that feeling! I woke myself up after a couple of seconds to make it go away.

That does sound freaky. Nice to know there is a way to escape if ever I should encounter that.

Had a hard time getting to sleep last night. Encountered lots of hypnagogic images but only recalled two.

1. I was a conscious particle of energy rapidly surging from cell to cell in plants and vines.
2. Lots of little chameleons with quickly twitching tails.

The energy in the imagery likely portrays my inability to get to sleep.

Silhouettes of flat black flames that could only be seen against the pre-sleep wall of darkness when they exuded a faint, glimmering pale white glow.

I enjoy them too. My all time favorite: someone from behind wearing a technicolor cloak made of butterflies.

I think that people notice HH's (HH's = hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucinations for anyone unfamiliar with the abbreviation we sometimes use here) more often than they realize. I believe people often think that they are sensing something from waking life (they may think a family member actually came into the bedroom or that there was an actual noise that makes sense). Yes, sometimes stimuli is actual waking life stimuli but I like to assume that most of the senses that I experience while I am going to sleep or waking up are HH's because that helps me continue the journey to (or back to) sleep while keeping my mind in the right place to become lucid. I think we too often mistake these "HH's" as something actually happening in waking life and that tends to bring us more into the waking realm. A good example was the sound of a party next door. Even if it were actual, by assuming it was HH's I was able to go back to sleep and I was also able to keep my awareness and become lucid.

Several historical figures have used HH's for creative arts and creative problem solving including Robert Louis Stevenson, Salvador Dali, Einstein and Newton among many others apparently. I came across a cool article while fact checking this. If you search "Nap like Salvador Dali" you will find it.

Some other HH's I remember or have personally noted:

conversations - very interesting though often hard to make out
static sound
vibrations
something furry on top of a chain link fence
someone pointing a camera like a gun
a dog with a tool belt on his back
house on a hill
person with blue powdered paints on face
dreadlocks tied into short strands sticking up on a guy's head
wrestler pinning down another wrestler
odd smell I haven't smelled in a long time, reminded me of middle school

Just to add that hypnagogic and hypnopompic images are very closely related to dreams themselves and should best be approached in the same way; that is, as Methos says, by not only by appreciating their startling independence and visual/auditory surprises, but by trying to reflect on them in order to uncover their meaning.

Carl Jung began observing these and other spontaneous products of the imagination over one hundred years ago and developed methods to help clarify their meaning while maintaining a sense of emotion along with a mature respect for them.

For example, he writes:

“Critical attention must be eliminated. Visual types should concentrate on the expectation that an inner image will be produced. As a rule such a fantasy-picture will actually appear— perhaps hypnagogically— and should be carefully observed and noted down in writing [Today, we can also use a small digital recorder instead].

Audio-verbal types usually hear inner words, perhaps mere fragments of apparently meaningless sentences to begin with, which however should be carefully noted down too. Others at such times simply hear their ‘other’ voice. There are, indeed, not a few people who are well aware that they possess a sort of inner critic or judge who immediately comments on everything they say or do”.

I believe that it’s also important to note the following:

“… after a certain point of psychic development has been reached, the products of the unconscious are greatly overvalued precisely because they were boundlessly undervalued before.”

That is, a person could tend to be sucked into a vortex of images and emotions, possibly becoming overly inflated by their beauty and strangeness in the process. Understanding their meaning can help to alleviate this possibility.

About this idea of balancing out the beautiful or “aesthetic” side of any images with understanding, Jung simply writes:

“… we could say that aesthetic formulation needs understanding of the meaning, and understanding needs aesthetic formulation.”

Jung also advised the following:

“Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form. This can be done by drawing, painting, or modelling. Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain. By shaping it, one goes on dreaming the dream [or exploring the hypnagogic and hypnopompic images] in greater detail in the waking state, and the initially incomprehensible, isolated event is integrated into the sphere of the total personality, even though it remains at first unconscious to the subject.”

Accurately analyzing hypnagogic/hypnopompic and dream images can benefit from reading books on symbols that have been derived from reliable sources (as opposed to most “dream dictionaries”) such as “A Dictionary of Symbols” by J. E. Cirlot, “The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols” by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, “The Herder Dictionary of Symbols”, “Ariadne’s Clue” by Anthony Stevens, “Dictionary of Images and Symbols in Counselling” by William Stewart, “Jungian Dream Interpretation” by James Hall, "Inner Work" by Robert Johnson, “Man and his Symbols” edited by C.G. Jung.