● REM sleep was discovered back in 1952 in a now famous series of findings by the "father" of sleep research, University of Chicago physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman, and his young graduate student Eugene Aserinsky.
● [...] there were other REM signatures, including total muscle paralysis and brain activity that looked almost identical in every way to waking activity, hence REM sleep's other name, "paradoxical sleep."
● The hypnagogic has a reputation for being a permeable transition state, where dreaming can reach across into waking and stir it up. Some artists claim it is a peerless state for creativity, that under the right circumstances brilliant ideas cascade down from remote hemispheric corners onto inspired canvases and manuscripts. Other claim it as a uniquely suggestive state for learning. They stock up on subliminal audiocassettes and Russian "hypnopedia" tutorials. The Internet is filled with sketchy-sounding techniques that promise to prolong and cultivate the hypnagogic state: "binaural beat" machines, trance-induction software, biofeedback "theta-training."
● Interest in the hypnagogic state goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who liked to "surprise the images which present[ed] themselves to him in sleep."
● In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes spoke of visions at sleep onset, a mysterious "kind of fancy." A century later, the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg recorded his hypnagogic explorations in a dream journal. He used the state as a departure point for intergalactic travel, his dream body zipping through the celestial spheres like a perfumed and bewigged prototype of the Silver Surfer.
● Serious scientific research on the hypnagogic began with nineteenth-century French psychologist Alfred Maury, who first coined the term. Throughout the twentieth century small groups of researchers continued to conduct studies, even during the deep chill of behaviorism, which put about as much faith in the subjective anecdote as your average parole officer.
● By far the most exhaustive account of hypnagogic research was published in 1987 in a book called [i]Hypnagogia[i], written by psychologist Andreas Mavromatis. The book is a frothy combination of rigorous scientific research, trippy illustrations, and high-end speculation.
● Mavromatis breaks it down into four distinct stages. The hypnagogic
experiences in this progression are like first-person versions of the physiological changes that Tadao Hori and Tore Nielsen chart so scrupulously on the EEG.
● I eventually figured out that the tricks to scrutinizing hypnagogia are to do it alone and to be hyper-mindful. San Francisco-based dream researcher and artist Fariba Bogzaran told me that people who meditate have an easier time of it because they have practices being both subject and observer at once. She says the important thing is not
crashing: instead, go to sleep consciously, and really try to notice the process of falling asleep. The result: a poor man's psychedelic trip.
● Leaving Mavromatis's four well-delinated stages for a moment, there's another sensation that can happen at the edge of sleep. It has terrorized sleepers for centures, and, as luck would have it (that is, luck combined with the heightened self-consciousness that comes with sleeping under video surveillance), a version of the phenomenon happened to me on the second night of my stay in the sleep lab. At about six in the morning, I woke from a dramatic dream. Thought not prompted, I decided to tell Phil about it [...] But when I tried to move my lips no sound came out. I was frozen. At that moment I became aware of a presence directly behind my head. [...] And then a voice, very clearly, whispered in my ear: "Harry versus Mad Potter." [...] I had just experienced a textbook case of "sleep paralysis."
