Hypnagogic Bliss, by Jennifer
I got into bed just past midnight and snuggled in to the opening bars of Somnium. Before long, I drifted into a deep hypnagogic state. In his 1987 book Hypnagogia, psychologist Andreas Mavromatis defines four hypnagogic states: first vague patterns, shape and light (for me often like pointillism), then floaty imagery, sound (maybe voices), perhaps the sensation of movement (that feeling of falling or involuntary jerking), then what he calls autosymbolic phenomena, vignettes or images that represent feelings or thoughts, and then finally hypnagogic dreams, usually shorter and less involved than dreams in REM sleep.
People who fall asleep easily, like me, usually spend less time in hypnagogic states. A long bout of it, then, is a real treat for me. Soon after I laid down, I drifted into that first stage. Bright, pixilated points of light danced around my field of vision like pixies, forming into kaleidoscopic whirling clouds. I continued through all the stages. Faces emerged from the swirling patterns and then become part of a surging crowd of people, a chilling wind blew through the tops of trees at night, a cartoon rodent tried to sell me a sailboat. I cycled through stages of hypnagogia, surfacing close to waking but then sinking down again. At first I tried not to pay much attention. That’s my normal trick for trying to maintain the state, since I always seem to wake myself up if start to notice things too much. But then I realized the hypagogia was staying constant. I could watch it like a movie, fully attentive, and not lose it. It was fabulous.
After what seemed like a long time, I fell asleep. I woke several times throughout the night, however, each time because the music had gone almost completely silent. I would wake up and think, “that’s strange, it’s over but it’s still dark”. Then I would hear distant strains and lie awake until the music returned. Each time, I fell asleep as soon as it filled the room again. I was clearly listening, and also in some way aware that the music had ended before it was supposed to. The piece ended sometime around 7 a.m., but I didn’t wake up then.
In one of my dreams, a very rich man had given a friend of mine a mansion to court her. My friend and I kept discovering things wrong with it, though. The glass dome observation deck started leaking in the rain and we realized it was just saran wrap. Then we discovered that the mansion was really a VW bug.