Harnessing the power of hypnagogia
There is a special moment that occurs every day of your life when the veil between your conscious and unconscious mind becomes thinner. A magical moment when you are able to access a bottomless fountain of creative potential. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that every day you are letting this moment slip by.
Contrary to popular belief we don’t dive into sleep immediately. Instead sleep comes in gradually, like a tide. The waters of our unconscious slowly rise, breaching the shore of our conscious mind and eventually submerging it. This tidal ebb and flow occurs in ninety-minute cycles throughout the night, and with each cycle we slowly wade through five ever-deepening stages of sleep.
The stage that receives the most hype, especially among creative types, is the final stage of the cycle, REM sleep. That’s because during REM, or rapid eye movement, we have our most vivid dreams. Lots of artists and writers have used their dreams to inspire their work—one popular example is Stephen King, who dreamed a version of his 1987 novel Misery during a transatlantic flight—but there’s just one problem with this approach: REM occurs when our conscious mind is fully submerged and at its weakest. So although our creativity is high during our REM state, the likelihood that we will remember anything from it is quite low. The water is just too deep.
What writers need instead is a shallower pool in which to wade. One where we still experience the mind-altering potential of dreams but also have enough consciousness left to remember—and, better yet, even control—the imagery behind our closed eyelids.
Lucky for us there is such a state. It occurs during the first few minutes of sleep and again when we are just waking up, and it is rife with creative potential.
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