by Michael Grosso
I go through spells of insomnia. At first they almost panicked me. My great fear was that I might no longer be able to fall
asleep. It’s usually so easy, but
I couldn’t do it any more. If this
keeps up, I will go crazy, I concluded. I would go two
or three nights in a row, and not recall falling asleep. At the worst of my insomnia, every time
I started to drift off, I’d wake up with a start. Fear of not sleeping made me
insomniac.
Not being able to sleep, I decided to exercise my mind and
tried different forms of meditation.
I controlled my breath and consciously relaxed my muscles,
especially the muscles in my face, throat, tongue, and eyes. As a result, I rested and stopped feeling
the need for sleep. I realized I
could stay awake and still rest my body, and I felt no fatigue when I got out
of bed in the morning.
I decided not to resist the insomnia. Something in me was fighting off sleep
for some reason, so I let it do its thing. Go with the insomnia, I said. Thinking about being awake was
keeping me awake, so I stopped trying to
sleep. But to do that I had to stop
thinking. So I got down to trying
to stop my mind completely.
After a few months of practicing this, I started to sleep
again but very late and very little.
And I almost never dreamed. But falling asleep had become interesting. For one, despite feeling the delicious
tug of imminent sleep coming over me, I became curious to see something I
sensed was coming.
I felt myself slipping into the twilight mental zone called hypnagogia. It’s a brief, intermediate state but can be dilated and
prolonged and I enjoyed lingering there on the threshold.
It was always unpredictable as to what turned up on a visit
to hypnagogia. I would pay
attention to what I was thinking about just before drifting off. The images
that flashed on my mind’s eye were
always discontinuous; they showed
no connection at all with my preceding thoughts. Landscapes, buildings; quick, disjointed scenes from unknown latitudes
were common. Where was it all coming from?
But then I started seeing people, their faces, and up close.
I can still see them, night after
night, strange but uniquely real people would appear before me—and very close,
breathing close. At first the
figures emerged nearby but looked away, as if they were not aware of me at all;
I peered at the details of their skin and features, eyes, nose, mouth. Sometimes I found myself amid crowds of
figures in noisy unfamiliar neighborhoods.
Once I recall two men drawing close and facing me but almost
with indifference. Then I started
to see women up close and others who seemed to approach me. I knew they were
phantoms, quasi-dream figures, but I found the sense of them being real people compelling
and therefore extremely puzzling.
Other times the figures began to look as if they were
conscious of me, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to attract their attention. A
few times the women leaned toward me and muttered something I couldn’t quite
hear. I wanted to observe them but
it began to feel as if they were observing me. The beings that crowded around
me night after night made slightly more aggressive gestures. They would come at me and I would feel
forced to open my eyes and wave them off. I became fascinated but also slightly unnerved by my
insomniac visitors.
Legions of twilight beings of unknown provenance seemed to
hover around me, but by this time the insomnia was in abeyance. And despite my attraction to them, the ones
I had come to know during my visits in the land of hypnagogia withdrew. I know they’re still there; but they have
become much more elusive.
I like to reflect on these curious experiences. I wonder
about those staring, poking phantoms that turned up in my nights of insomnia. Right now I can think of three possible
explanations.
Begin with the most obvious. The phantoms I saw were nothing more than creatures of my
own dream life. As far as the
realism, originality, and uniqueness of the faces; first, we build up a store
of memories of thousands of faces we might evoke in a hypnagogic reverie. Second, check out a previous post of
mine about Mark Twain on the dream-artist within us all, the incredible power
of the dreaming imagination to conjure up scenes, characters, and dramatic
events in compelling detail.
Imagine—a Shakespeare in us all!
A second possibility is that I’m picking up on the dream
life of other people. Studies show that dreams are a common vehicle for
telepathy or precognition. I know
from experience that the hypnagogic state is, as they say,
“psi-conducive.” I was dozing on a
bus ride to Provincetown, and slipped into that mental zone called
hypnagogia—“leading to sleep.” The sense of being awake is intact but the
perceptual environment becomes surreal. In that state, I watched an amusing
hallucination of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
I woke up and resumed looking out the window. I reach under my seat and pull up some
newspapers (never seen before) and open at random to a page with a feature
story about Walt Disney, the creator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Being in that odd state seems to have
done something to my mental outreach—called clairvoyance.
A third possibility, I won’t rule out. Some of the faces are apparitions of
dead souls. Perhaps a brief glance
into what seems like a world intensely concrete but also quite fleeting. Mavromatis’s findings confirm my
experience of the otherness of the hypnagogic state, which is as uncontrollable
and unpredictable as it is strange and mysterious.
Hypnagogia is the original twilight zone. Epiphanies and archetypes flashing
through the aperture of fleeting mind flashes. Getting there through insomnia may be tricky but is a gateway
to an unknown world, a territory worthy of exploration.
