“They called it REM sleep for years,” Ursula Le Guin wrote, in her novel The Lathe of Heaven. “It’s a hell of a lot more than that, though. It’s a third state of being.”
Dreaming represents a state in between consciousness and unconsciousness, and this year I’ve been trying to get on top of what we know about this universal and mysterious experience.
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I went to a dream conference in Arizona, and spent the night in a dream lab in Swansea, UK. There I learned about research providing evidence, for the first time, that explains the purpose of dreaming.
But while scientists are learning more about the function of dreams and of sleep, I’ve been particularly drawn to the mysterious border state between wakefulness and slumber. Sleep scientists call this transient period the hypnagogic state, a highly creative state that has been actively pursued by artists and scientists over the years.
Two hundred years ago, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, a masterpiece written when she was only 19. The book’s impact is still being felt: when gene-edited children were born in China in November many commentators.
But how did Shelley conceive her idea? She had absorbed huge amounts of modern science from discussions with her husband, Percy Shelley, and their friend George Gordon (Lord) Byron, when they were living in a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. They spoke, among other things, of the origins of life and the feasibility of reanimating a corpse with electricity. Mary’s mind was buzzing with these ideas, and one night the trio decided to each write a horror story.
As Mary fell asleep, the idea for Frankenstein came to her in what she called a “waking dream”.
For me, this state often takes the form of a dream of crossing the road. My toe strikes the kerb and I stumble, and with a sudden jerk I’m awake. That sudden movement is called a hypnagogic jerk. What seems to be happening is that the part of the brain that controls our movements is slowly winding down, but there’s a spark of action just before it turns off. There’s a last flicker of power, and this is manifest as a muscle spasm. Sometimes, the part of the brain that is starting to drift into dreaming incorporates the spasm into its narrative. So you get my story of stubbing your toe on the sidewalk; this sort of thing is called dream incorporation.
Hypnagogic dreams are sometimes mundane, but often they can be extraordinarily rich in imagery and ideas. I’ve sometimes been aware of this flow. The problem is that usually you continue into deeper sleep and forget them. It’s only if something drags you out of the borderlands that you can cling to the ideas that were bubbling away.
This happened to Mary Shelley. In her hypnagogic vision in Geneva, she saw Victor Frankenstein. From the introduction to the 1831 edition:
“When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”
It was the germ of the story that would change the world, and her account shows that it came to her as a hypnagogic hallucination (Journal of the Neurological Sciences, DOI:).
The chemist Friedrich August Kekulé also benefited from the creative power of this brain state. He had been trying to deduce the chemical structure of benzene, and as he dozed off he had a vision of a ring of serpents, each eating the tail of the snake in front. He realised that benzene was a similar ring of six carbon atoms. Thomas Edison would hold metal balls in his hand as he dozed off – the relaxing of muscles as the hypnagogic state passed into true sleep would cause the balls to fall with a crash and wake him, allowing him to remember what had been bubbling in his head. Nikola Tesla, Ludwig van Beethoven and Isaac Newton have also credited hypnagogia with increased creativity.
To investigate what is happening during these creative surges, I spent the night in a dream lab in Swansea. Mark Blagrove and Michelle Carr are investigating many aspects of sleep and dream, and have a protocol to try and induce lucid dreams. While I didn’t achieve lucidity, I did repeatedly experience the hypnagogic state. The “river of ideas” – when you find yourself observing a flow of seemingly unrelated thoughts and images – is a fascinating experience. I’ve entered the state during meditation, but more commonly during moments of hypnagogia which may only last a few seconds. My aim is to try and more reliably bring about this state.
