What comes to mind in the moments before you fall asleep? What strange ideas land at the edges of your consciousness, fluttering soft as moths toward dim light before sleep pulls the cord and your awareness clicks off completely?
In the liminal space between waking and sleeping, our thoughts soften, stretch, distort. Sometimes when I am loosening into that in-betweenness before dreams, I have thoughts that feel truer than their rational counterparts. There’s the sense of solving a puzzle or unraveling a knot.
This is the hypnagogic state of consciousness: when reality bends and then dissolves. Psychologists call this state the “twilight” period of brain activity for the way it moves between shades of dark and light. Hypnagogic thoughts are associative and even hallucinatory. In my experience, hypnagogia often produces the same attunement I feel when listening to poetry read aloud.
In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin writes, “There’s great wisdom in transitional realms between wakefulness and sleep.” The psyche, he adds, can access deeper wisdom than our conscious mind: “It provides a far less limited view. An oceanic source.”
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