Hypnagogia is the transitional state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep. During hypnagogia, it's common to experience involuntary and imagined experiences. These are referred to as hypnagogic hallucinations. It can range from auditory hallucinations and bodily sensations, to sleep paralysis and full on visual hallucinations. They can be bizarre and sometimes terrifying.
This state can be induced on purpose with a little practice of holding an object over a metal plate while falling asleep. As you slowly drift off, you will rest on a line where the subconscious and conscious mind are both awake. Eventually if you end up falling asleep completely the object will immediately slip from your fingers and will crash down onto the plate, jerking you awake. As you jerk awake, bizarre thoughts will sometimes flood into your mind. And then you can write them down.
A lot of artists, inventors and creative minds have used this technique such as Salvador Dali, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and Edgar Allan Poe -- which they have all credited hypnagogia to be a great inspiration for their ideas.
20 y/o male, developed decently strong hypnagogic hallucinations over the past year which I see every single night. I also on occasion when extremely tired go straight into REM sleep and can feel my eyes darting around while I'm semi conscious. This led me to believe there could well be a neurological issue with my sleep but I wasn't sure what it was.
Always had trouble staying awake in classes at school etc but attributed that more to the 4 hours I was sleeping a night not being enough.
I have no signs of cataplexy and rarely if ever get sleep attacks, but I would say that I spend more time being tired than your average person. I think I would say I have excessive daytime drowsiness but unsure as to what is causing it.
Does falling asleep at inappropriate times or cataplexy come later as it "develops" or do I likely not have narcolepsy at all? Not asking for a diagnosis, I will see my doctor as soon as I can, just want to know if it progresses as I get older? Not even asking for confirmation of symptoms (rule 1), more wondering if it continues to develop or stays as it is??
I'm a 27-year-old guy who has had what I'm guessing is hypnagogia for the past 8 years. The thing is that it only happens when I wake up in the morning and try to go back to sleep. And unfortunately, it's gotten to the point where it's actually become an addiction. I know what triggers it and will take every chance I get to let it happen, leading to negative consequences with work, family, friends, and just time management in general. I feel like the only time I feel alive is when I'm in this state of mind. If I try to trigger it and am unsuccessful, I get really mad. If it is successful, I will spend hours in dreamland. I should probably point out that I suffer from depression which might be why I'm addicted. Anybody ever go through a similar thing? Any tips?
The hypnagogic state can be induced by incremental reductions in external stimulation, low levels of sleep deprivation can also lead to hypnagogia. hypnagogic hallucinations are often misinterpreted as such, but it is important to know that they are not really hallucinations at all. They represent a person's perception at the boundary between wakefulness and sleep. in this state a very special aspect of human consciousness can be explored, the human mind can observe itself while it is taking place, the subject can watch itself perceiving. This is a very rare experience because it takes place at a specific moment in time when the individual no longer has cognitive control over their thought process.
Hypnagogia is a phenomenon that is beginning to be studied scientifically. Hypnagogia is the awareness of being in a non-arousing state in which one has no dreams or thoughts, no awareness of external stimuli, and minimal dream-like imagery. The subject loses most or all sense of being in the waking world, as if outside the body, or is dreaming but unable to recognize that he or she is dreaming.
Hypnagogic hallucinations are generally experienced as visually based, sometimes accompanied by a sense of motion and pressure, but rarely include any auditory sense.
It is said that the easiest way to induce hypnagnogia is to have a lack of sleep, but there are other methods that are just as effective.
The traditional method was found by gradually reducing external stimulation and staying awake. This will create an environment in which one begins to hallucinate or dream. It is important not to confuse these hallucinations as they are not really hallucinations at all, they represent one's perception at the border between wakefulness and sleep in which a very special aspect of human consciousness can be explored: the mind's eye view.
This reduction of external stimulation can be experienced through mindfulness while falling asleep, as well as meditation with an emphasis on stillness of the body, one pointed focus (observation of the breath), and patience.
I hope this helps
https://youtu.be/N_AFPa-gq3U
Does anyone have advice on dealing with hypnagogia? I keep starting to drift off and then I see these images of shapes or other arbitrary things and then I realize I'm falling asleep and it startles me a little and I wake back up. I repeat this over and over until finally I don't catch that I'm drifting and I fall asleep for real. Does anyone else have this type of anxiety specifically?
What tips do you guys have for this. WILD, FILD, in these techniques I can never seem to go from hypnagogia to the dream. Sometimes the hypnagogia is so powerful i think I might actually be dreaming, but even then I haven’t yet.
Hi everyone. I’m 26 years old and have suffered with what I believe is hypnagogia for most of my life. Recently it happens every single night now and it scares the crap out of me. I will lay in bed and I will finally start to doze off and without fail I end up waking up and I can see someone standing over me and trying to touch me. I can feel the bed “moving” as if someone is crawling up towards me and I put the covers over my head to “protect” myself. Within a few minutes I “wake up” but I’m so scared that it keeps me up for hours after. I also tend to reach for objects that appear above me too. It feels so real too which is the scary part. I have a 6 month old son and I’m currently pregnant with our second so I need all the sleep I can get. Is this what hypnagogia is? What causes this to happen more frequently? It would very rarely happen when I was younger but it did happen but now with it being every night I’m concerned as to what is causing it. So glad I found this group.
Hey guys i dont fully understand what you mean by audio hyp. Hallucination? Some people described it like it is just normal thought ( in inner voice) or something like mind pop that is tottaly normal ( mind wandering) . Or do you actually can hear a voice like auditory hallucination , like someone is in the room , behinde you , speaking into your ear?
Thanks
Soo, recently I've been experiencing Hypnagogia quite regularly, which basically consists of auditory and visual hallucinations in kind of a state between sleeping and being awake. In my case the reason for that is probably a mix of sleep deprivation and an immense alcohol and weed consumption every weekend, but that's another story!
It's quite a cool experience actually, but it can get pretty stressful, and it keeps me from falling asleep properly quite often. Especially since it often includes sleep paralysis for me aswell! The cool parts (hearing complete songs, including lyrics etc. for example) kinda outweigh that for me though haha.
This week I happened to look at the clock twice after it happened to me, and both times it was exactly 1:20 a.m!
Just an interesting little coincidence I guess, but still kinda cool imo :) Any of you had Hypnagogia aswell?
How do I avoid falling back asleep when I experience hypnagogia? Today I experienced some hallucinations along with paralysis and I thought I was on the verge of entering a LD but instead I fell back asleep and entered a regular dream Any tips
So I've been trying to learn WILD. I've still got a ways to go with it, but I've found that my immediate problem is that whenever I get to the state of hallucinations, especially auditory, I'm like OMG COOL and wake right back up. Is there a good way of remaining calm through this or any tips anyone can give me?
One that was split into colors entered by technologies. Idk how I see these places sometimes.
It started with a theater man on a balcony being swallowed by curly poofy hair fire and his skeleton pushing out of his back as he looked into it.
Then it switched to a place with all these colors.
They were all black and animals of a color in different properties.
There was the orange sunfire where the animals were under it and flair emtied upwards.
There was the teal xenowater where the animals were within it and had unknown flow.
There was the pink rosescale where the animals were amoung made and had grow scales.
There was the white flowerbite where the animals were not black but white and grew bitting.
Their was the tharthruth hangsight were the animals were varied from color to black and hang sighted.
After that I saw other worlds, one had a strange translucid living species that was beautiful but kindof gross, one was aquatic like and a fish like a ufo flew away from a predator.
Then I saw an intelligent species of hands touching balls on a ceiling that began to ripple pattern like a zebra when they held on to the balls on the ceiling.
Then I saw an entity create a universe with book pages as rivers where the worlds occupied island boxes inside between the rivers where people ran around in 2d on the surface.
Then I saw a place where all the men and women lived in bouquets and had flower penis vaginas.
Then I fell asleep as this all disapeared.
I think I'm using something similar to astral projection in other directions then up the ladder to do this, that lead to other worlds I see. Although sometimes its activated by exploring pareidolia patterns and eccelerating my think in inspiration.
But it always transports me in closed eye to these vision of other universe with very distinct rules from ours. The other cool thing is I can interact with it and sortof tell events and then it displays them on the vision so I can like do things while there in the stream that relate or that change the other universe.
Or I can sortof navigate kindof like astral projection, but in other directions then up through the hypnagogia to these other worlds hidden in the distance, which are hard to find, but sometimes show up, it seems like hypnagogia is a space.
You travel through the space and it leads to other realms in the outside of your frame that is this world.
But I haven't fully figured it out because I always just run into one by accident while using parsem
... keep reading on reddit ➡I can't seem to see any hypnagogia and I'm trying to learn wild, help
Last night I was trying to sleep as normal (usually I attempt lucid dreaming when I wake up in the middle of the night) and I took some melatonin to ensure I would fall asleep early. I guess I got too relaxed because as I was beginning to fall asleep I heard an extremely loud horn sound off in my left ear (the one facing the bed; I was trying to sleep on my side) and it scared me so much I was back to being awake again. I hadn’t even realized how close I was to sleeping until it happened... hopefully if I hallucinate during that stage in the future it isn’t loud or sudden enough to wake me up lol
To give a brief account. This happened like, literally around 15 minutes ago. For my time currently at least.
I hadn't slept the entire night because I didn't feel sleepy at all. At one point I went to charge my phone and sat on my char to wait for it to charge a little bit. At one point I my brain blocked, or it is more accurate to say the state I entered was between involuntary falling asleep and daydreaming. I was able to stay awake because I was tappiny my foot on the ground constantly (unintentionally, but now that I think of it it served as a reality check of sorts)
Anyway during that state I began to imagine very weird visuals of what I was thinking about at the time. (cough) After a while I realized something about my thoughts was strange because what I daydreamed about flickered from imagination to a semi illusory state back and forth. I subconsciously tried to navigate it and directed it to music. It started producing different styles of music, each brief for several seconds at a time. At that time it's like your state of mind and the direction you give it mix up in a jumbled mess and produce interesting results. Honestly, I'm usually a creative person, but I haven't experienced something like this before. The mind can produce some really fascinating results.
I'll try to experiment with the way to do it further, since I want to try to learn how to induce this state manually. (Since this state allows you to enter extreme creativity in a sense).
If I were to give a step by step of how I'll try it...
First, I'd let my mind wander a bit and try to fall asleep. I'll try to use a reality check like tapping my finger on the bed, but I'll let myself do that subconsciously so I can relax and try to drift to sleep.
Second, I'll wait for the vivid imagery to appear, when I sense that they started appearing, I'd probably recommend not concentrating as that would jolt you up from thenl state. Instead I'd suggest not controlling, but influencing you line of thought and allowing your mind to create the imagery for you. You can also try that for music (imagine the humming of music in your ears).
That's about it. I'm also writing this cus I may forget when I fall asleep in a few minutes, so I thought that I may as well put it here for others to see. Bye 👋
Hello fellow dreamers. I have been trying to become lucid with the WILD/FILD methods for the past 2 months now. No matter how hard I try though, I can never remember experiencing hypnagogia or any buzzing around my head. I have heard that you can walk into your dream this way, but upon further investigation, I usually fall asleep within 4-8 minutes and go deep into sleep for at least an hour. Any methods I should try to better induce hypnagogia?
Hey Redditors, I’ve always had really intensive proprioceptive hypnagogia without know what it was - but it’s gotten more intrusive lately, and shifting to my perception of where my partner is also, so I finally did some googling and figured out what it was. Does anyone else have this here? Intensive feelings of different parts, or my entire body changing size dramatically - like shriveling to a tiny stick person, then blowing up like a marshmallow. I wondered if this was perhaps Alice in wonderland syndrome, but it’s not visual, happens in the dark, and usually when I’m tired (but not always when I’m falling asleep). I had it a lot more as a child, and when it’s intrusive it can be hard to fall asleep properly.
Disclaimer: I've only had a lucid dream once, and it was by accident. I am yet to achieve lucid dreaming. I tried Exploreluciddreaming's cycles method.
Last night I tried a technique where I woke up at 3:00 AM and stayed awake for ten minutes. I went back to bed and did cycles where I focussed on the senses of vision, hearing, and touch. I was lying on my back and before long my right hand went quite numb. My heart started beeping rapidly and my whole body started to tingle lightly and I think for a few seconds I felt somewhat weightless. My leg - specifically my thigh - was twitching.
P.S. I also heard a tapping right by the wall behind my head, I don't know if it was real or not, but it was quite subtle and could have been my sister who sleeps in the room behind that wall.
Were these hypnagogic hallucinations?
I've heard a lot of conflicting information when it comes to hypnagogia, like it only happens when you're going into REM or that it happens all the time. So I'm just wondering if this is hypnagogia or not. Every single time I go to sleep I can initiate imagery partially at will in about a minute. This imagery contains absolutely random things like a hole, tunnels, and treasure maps. These things are very realistic and are not controllable by thought I believe (I've tried it hasn't worked) and it happens constantly. The imagery happens in waves where its literally a fluid like animation of the image spreading across the screen, sometimes it has holes sometimes its full. The brightness of the room changes the appearance of the imagery, and eventually I can willfully "enlarge" it where it covers my entire field of view even though it already does (you can imagine it as if your vision right now enlarged to fit a larger FOV).
I've been trying to get lucid from naps while being conscious the whole time and when it gets to hypnagogia my heart starts racing and I try to wait it out but I feel like it goes away. How long does hypnagogia last during naps?
Hello everyone,
I started lucid dreaming naturally quite young and a few years ago I got interested in it and started researching it more, keeping a dream journal and practicing reality checks. It was all working, I was having more lucid dreams and I would try to control them. But then I realized it affected my sleep in general, I would fall asleep while staying involuntarily conscious. I got scared that it would turn into sleep paralysis which I’ve never experiences but I’m terrified of. Now that I researched it I think I was probably just getting into an hypnagogic phase. I can feel I’m in between states of wakefulness and sleep. I get weird feelings like that my whole body is shaking and everything gets dark or white, my heart is racing and it’s a big effort to move my body.
It only happens when I start to pay more attention to my dreams and get into lucid dreaming. I feel as if playing with my awareness in lucid dreams causes me to get confused between states of consciousness and then have hypnagogia « hallucinations ». So my question is has anyone experienced something similar? Do you have tips on how to not be scared of hypnagogia or how to avoid it? Thanks!
Hey, I just wanted to get some other people's insight on this. About 6 to 8 months ago I was getting really good at hypnagogia and I was feeling on the verge of lucid dreaming regularly; I could regularly stay focused while feeling by body going to sleep which tingled all over quite unmistakably Since then mi wife gave birth to our second son and naturally our schedule got turned upside down. Lately I find myself unable to even focus for 5 mins before I sleep and just sleep aimlessly, I'm not saying I don't try but I cannot concentrate like 8 months ago and just staying focused for 5 minutes after going to bed is really difficult. I strongly believe that the body is the mind and the mind is the body, in the sense that you can make yourself physically I'll if you're felling low and conversely you can affect your mindset and mind in general in a positive way by taking good care of yourself, sleeping well, exercising, eating clean, etc. Any tips on how to get back on track?
Last night I (accidentally) did several WILD/WBTB attempts. I could feel the sensations of my body being in some sort of rollercoaster 3 times tonight, and the 3rd time I actually succeeded and entered a lucid dream through a false awakening. However the first 2 times I woke up for real despite being really deep into the WBTB hypnagogia/sensations. Could anyone give me some advice for how to continue once you feel the hypnagogia? thanks!
^
I experience hypnagogia a LOT. I don't know if weird, wavy flashing lights are general hypnagogia, but I see it before I fall asleep, sometimes when I'm praying, and etc. Is there some sort of way to use hypnagogia as an LD activator? Or is hypnagogia an indicator for a lucid dream?
It is usually guaranteed to happen if I meditate before I go to sleep. But sometimes It will feel like I’m looking at something with my eyes open, when they are closed. An example would be me playing a video game, but it is fairly short.
Also, I will sometimes have like a shock of anxiety or energy, It’s like I came to a realization of something that I have been neglecting. Or like I am realizing the magnitude of something.
I seen that Hypnagogia is more common with teen and young adults, I’m 20 so that could play a factor. I’m just quite confused, any help would be appreciated.
