playing with hypnagogic imagery

Quest for Lucidity
1

Hey, this is my first post, I hope that I’m putting it in the right bit of the forum. I’ve spent quite a while reading and searching in the discussions already on here, there’s one thing I’m interested in though that I couldn’t find anything on.

This is a technique I discovered about a month ago, and I’ve had success every time that I’ve tried it. It isn’t the same thing as lucid dreaming, but practising it seems to make me more likely to lucid dream that night and it’s interesting in its own right too. You basically just keep typing as you fall asleep - so you have to be able to touch type, without thinking about it. Then, if you type the thoughts and images that come into your mind you find that you start get very vivid images and fall in and out of consciousness. You can’t be lucid in this state, it’s more like flashes of awareness that alternate with confusion, but you can get some very interesting material out of it.

I think that the movement of typing helps you to stay awake a bit, so it’s worth just moving your fingers on the keys even when your mind is blank. Or you can type self-hypnosis things to help you start to fall asleep.

Here’s an example of the kind of stuff I get:

I thought someone in the shop mademe jump, somehow although I am I n bed
Or did I, maube I didn’tthink that
Well why don’t you look throught elock – said viesh,
But

There are polar bearsin other possible worlds. Welll0well-welcome.

Now is there any change that we can move together (gay couple talking)
After a motel incident likein to wong foo……
I look like kermit th e frog in this – firl in red jumper saing I am kermit the frog on the front, otherwise no resnembalce maybe that wa s a fas=lse anlogy.
Bruch I don’t want to wait for their food to go mouldy, let it stink

Ouwls owls
With restored spine
Into difencesed we no

Scrubes, carla dn turk swap palcesforesd but maybe it doesn’t work

Usually when I read over it I have about a page and a half of stuff that I remember thinking and seeing and then about another page of stuff that is completely foreign to me.

Has anyone else done something like this? Or any other work with HI?

2

this is very interesting …but do you type on a real computer or do you visualize that you are typing something?

3

cool.

how to you arage yourself so you can type and half sleep?
so you have a laptop?

4

I use my laptop. Like I said it isn’t really lucidity, it’s a fairly confused state, so it’s only because I am actually typing that I can look back afterwards to see what I was visualizing. I was a bit worried at first that I’d just fall asleep with my laptop and wake up with my bed on fire or something, but it hasn’t happened yet.

It’s a bit like when you’re falling asleep and someone keeps talking to you, and you can’t keep track of what’s reality and what’s your thoughts, that same kind of switching backwards and forwards between consciousness and sleep.

Edit: I didn’t really explain - I don’t fall asleep completely while doing this, so I decide when to stop and put my laptop on the floor. But I must be very nearly asleep because I don’t always remember doing that.

5

Interesting.
No I’ve never actually done that, though after reading this I’d want to try something similar, trying to draw while putting myself into the hypnogogic state. It sounds as if you are the kind of person thats on the computer all the time- I know I probably couldn’t fall asleep in front of it. But for others it may work better to try a hobby of their own. _________ (Fill in the blank) could be anything.

This actually reminds me of something else that happened not too long ago; It made me realize that I knew more than I thought about dreams-just not neccesarily with the same terminology you guys use on the forum.
We were going into the little details of the novel Frankenstein through articles written about it. It turns out the story itself came from hypnogogic imagery.
Mary Shelley was in the company of ghost story telling authors: “but one night after the company had been discussing galvanism and reanimation of corpses her night was fitifully disturbed, and far beyond the usual bounds of reverie; the ideas and images came to her. Many artists have reported this experience of creative work in a state between sleep and waking, on a problem which has been worrying them but hers is one of the most complete accounts of the emergence of a literary work from the unconscious into the unconscious mind”

There’s more to it, I’ll finish it if anyone is interested. Who knows, Ant maybe one of these days you’ll be inspired into semi cousciously typing something amazing…

6

this is a wonderful idea i’ve wished to create stories by sleeping while typing … how to fall asleep while sitting here ? i suppose i could do it drift off in the computer chair then start writing all my thoughts lol it would be interesting might do it right now since its really late

7

This reminds me of image streaming, but you do that while awake. In image streaming you usually use a friend or a tape recorder. You close your eyes and discribe with the most detail possible whatever images or ideas pop into your head. These images come a lot easier when you’re falling asleep… Anyway, the idea is to get unconscious thoughts into consciousness.

I don’t do it very much (so if I’m saying something wrong about image streaming, please correct me…), but I’ve noticed when I’m falling asleep, there’s a moment where pretty random stuff starts coming to mind. It’s cool. :tongue:

8

I think I saw another topic like this, but they were listening to music while typing?