Falling asleep is the complex process during which your own brain puts you in an unconscious state and it is an amazing thing how the brain does that. My dad, an anesthesiologist, told me that conscience is relative, it’s not black or white but can go through many shades of gray. Lucid dreamers already know that. But some still think of falling asleep only as the boring part before a lucid dream. Falling asleep is an art and when it’s performed correctly, it can feel like a symphony of sensations.
It is a very subjective experience, but the mechanisms are fundamentally the same. Some people take falling asleep for granted, dismiss it as something that has to be done quickly and go through it without realizing its wonders. If only they increased their awareness of their own body, they would realize just how amazing this process is. During sleep, only some functions of the body are working at 100%, the others are at rest. While your alarm clock can still wake you up, you don’t hear everything that is happening around you, if not, dreams would be constantly disturbed by noises coming from the real world. I will let the physiologic explanations apart and focus on falling asleep as one experiences it.
When you lie down own your bed, you start relaxing quickly and actually start falling asleep when your body is relaxed and your mind at rest. At first you have complete awareness of your body and through your senses, complete awareness of your surroundings. You can feel each part of your body and what touches it. You can sense the position of your limbs, the aches in your body if you have any, the temperature in the room, sounds, smells and gravity pushing you in your mattress. At some point you start feeling heavier like if gravity increased slightly and plunges you in your mattress a little more. Then you lose your first sense, proprioception. you can’t actually feel the position of your limbs anymore. You have to sense what is touching you to know the position of your body. You might think that your arms were resting behind your head but you can feel the air on the back of your hands and realize you are wrong. If you have trouble falling asleep you can trigger this by imagining your arms in unusual positions.
After that, nociception is repressed to the point that you can only feel only intense pain. All the tiny aches, painful scars and bruises become numb. Thermoception, which is linked to nociception is also altered. You might feel hot waves or be unable to detect the temperature of the room. If you were cold before, you might not be anymore. I sometimes feel like warm liquids are poured over my feet, legs and arms.
Then kinesthesioception and equilibrioception are altered and you start feeling false angular accelerations. You might feel that your bed is rotating around a sagittal axis and that your body is sticking to your mattress only because of the centrifugal force. This can make your head spin harder than a roller-coaster. This is a great feeling.
As your body is more and more relaxed, your mind is also relaxing and it becomes harder to focus on complex matters. If you are an adept of mantras or counting, you might start losing your count. But you are not yet asleep.
As you go deeper, closer to unconsciousness, your sense of touch and your entire body become numb. While you can still feel something that starts touching you, you don’t feel what was on your skin before so you can’t feel if the sheets cover your arms or not. With proprioception already altered you may not know the position of your body and if you try moving at this point you might realize that your arms, legs or entire body were in a completely different position than you thought.
At this point, you can’t feel your body, temperature or position and you spin, this whole feeling is worth enough to stop in the process of falling asleep and enjoy what is going on. It is the opposite of the sensation you have after a long day of work when you are exhausted and battered. You feel like you are floating in heaven, spinning while being extremely relaxed.
I don’t know what happens to smell and taste since there is no particular smell or anything in my mouth while I go to sleep.
The last two senses, sight and hearing, are altered in a spectacular way: hypnagogic hallucinations. You see phosphenes and hear sounds that vary from music or voices to random noises. You are on the surface of unconsciousness, the last limit before sleep, you are so close to the dream world that you might start seeing people. I usually see dancing lights and hear sounds exactly like what you can hear in the first eight seconds of “Foxey Lady” by Jimi Hendrix. I sometimes see luminous pictures of landscapes and hear voices talking an unknown language.
You can go through this whole process backwards while waking up. You start by experiencing hypnopompic hallucinations, you don’t know in which position you are, your mind is fuzzy, you don’t know where you are. Then everything starts coming back.
You might have a quite different experience of it but I’m sure you’ll find it amazing.
The key in experiencing this is being aware of your body and your surroundings. I found that the more aware I was of falling asleep, the more likely I was to be lucid in my dream. My personal version of WILDing is based on that and it is very effective for me (check my topic on “surfing”).
So listen to your body while you fall asleep, it’s playing a wonderful symphony!
! But how exactly do you remain conscious? For me consciousness really seems black and white, where I’m awake one moment and asleep the next. If I could master your method of falling asleep it would help me WILD immensely.
I’ve done a few successful DEILDs, but I had really no HI or HH once or twice, and another time I was asleep enough to let myself be drawn into the scene going on in my head until I ended up in a dream. yawns Well, I haven’t had dinner yet. Maybe I’ll think about this if I WBTB in the early morning.
I (we all 
) should really meditate some more! and learn how to quiet the mind.
and it’s always increadible and worth it. I usually just think “some violins would sound nice here” and they start playing in such amazing ways I’d never be able to imagine 