The Hypnagogic Drift
The best hypnagogia happens while driving. When the mind is unwilling to go to sleep, and yet is brought into sleep by the body, by the highway drone, the hypnagogic zone is expansive and large, the body suffused with a warm and rushing euphoria. The hallucinations then are rich and blissed out. It is a return to the sleep of childhood.
But the shock of being pulled from the cascading images of this liminal zone to that of steering an automobile on the superhighway is harsh and jarring. You jerk the wheel in a panic, ashamed to have blacked out. And yet your only desire is go back to that realm. The nap by the side of the road never yields such promise or bliss.
Likewise, falling asleep on the subway, where the press of bodies swaying in the loud hum of the car lulls one into a warm psychic pool. Not wishing to sleep surrounded by strangers drags the mind through shadowy forests in a giant narrative that you only see in brief snatches as your head droops to rest on the person next to you, until a shrug or the jerk of the subway startles you awake into the anxiety of the crowd.
The hypnagogia experienced while reading is more rote, smaller and quieter but no less strange, the mind leaping from images in the text to melt into a quick pool of lucidity and velocity, advancing at extreme speeds upon hidden forest kingdoms that vanish as soon as the hawk of the mind catches at the text again. The strangest visions are the ones of reading a text found in the dream, as if your brain was writing itself a message that had not yet been consciously thought.
It should be noted that hypnagogia is a realm that may be explored. Salvadore Dali, Thomas Edison, and Franz Kafka are each psychonauts of the hypnagogic drift.
Hypnagogia is a rabbit. Quick, warm, cozy in fur, and yet totally vulnerable to the hawk of consciousness. The Rabbit stands still in an enchanted garden while your older sister reads her boring book. You can’t help but follow down the rabbithole and right out of waking thought. Falling and speed, current and drift are the primary feelings of following this rabbit. It is a conscious fall into the unconscious. The rabbit has the power to make the ground or bed disappear. The feeling of falling is the feeling of your physical body rapidly diminishing into dream. The warm body euphoria, as profound as the child falling asleep in a moving car, is the body’s joy in returning to the womb, a total release of tension into the static, bodiless non-space of psychic drift; and yet it is always the body that anchors the dreaming mind.
But it is not all warmth and euphoria for this rabbit also has the power to paralyze. The body falls into the stasis of dream and the mind, half awake and finding it no longer commands motor function, reacts in fear. The rabbit screams. It is as if a certain kind of hypnagogic image itself, appearing unbidden from out of the chasm of the universe, irrational, non-sequitur, forged in parataxis and nightmare, can induce in the waking mind incapacitation and momentary madness.
Like the psychedelic brain state, hypnagogia melts down the ego and the running narratives of self. The strong current of dream, like a river in spring, pulls the mind away from the I. The grogginess felt upon waking and regaining power over the body, is the grogginess of a stranger in a strange room, the ego slowly coming back online, piecing back together the operative figment that is the functioning self; as if your I-function had been rescued from being swept away downstream. And yet in another moment the force of that current dissipates altogether and you are wide awake.
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