Posts Tagged ‘dream’
Tales from Hypnagogia
February 21st, 2010 Posted 12:51 am
Hypnagogia
noun
a term for the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, characterized by dreamlike auditory, visual, or tactile sensations when half-awake.
Many years ago, I remember waking up one morning, checking the time on my phone, and being surprised to see six weird, random words on the screen which I must have written as a note while I was asleep: “I need to talk to Gentor.”
What on earth…? It made no sense at all. I didn’t know anyone or anything called Gentor and I certainly didn’t want to speak to him/her/it. Eventually I summoned a vague memory of hearing this sentence in my head as I was trying to fall asleep the previous night, and for whatever reason I obviously must have woken up and recorded the words onto my phone.
Over the following few weeks I did some research and found that this was caused by a phenomenon known as the hypnagogic state. This is the watery, dreamlike state of consciousness your mind turns to as you are in the process of falling asleep, but not quite fully asleep just yet. During this process you may experience the randomest of images, shapes, colours, sounds, sensastions, hallucinations, or seemingly in my case, words, filtering through into the half-conscious eye of your mind – not quite with the “fullness” experienced from an actual dream, but moreso in brief bursts, and often more lucid and memorable.
Anyway, recently I’ve noticed these hypnagogic words have been coming to me two or three times a week, so over the past two months I’ve written down every one that my mind has graced me with! I’ve literally been going to bed at night, closing my eyes, drifting off, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere I’ll be hit by this short, whacked-out, extremely random sentence or question that makes barely any sense at all, sometimes even including completely made-up words that have no meaning whatsoever. I wake up and write them down as soon as this happens – and now, for your enoyment, transcribed below is this unpredictable and peculiar insight into my subconscious night-time mentality:
I first had a chicken when I was twelve.
They get all desperate to find out.
You don’t want to suit me up to be a bear?
In the process of renewing and travelling, did you go travelling?
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Electric Dreams
January 12th, 2010 Posted 10:21 pm
No, before you ask, I’m not talking about the movie, TV series or the Human League song. (and what a cheesy but great song it is, I must add!)
I’m instead talking about actual electric dreams. Let me explain:
A few weeks ago at approximately 3:30am whilst deep in slumber, I witnessed within my own head a very memorable and vivid scene. I dreamt that I was walking through a setting in the bush with lush, green trees all around me and the bright blue sky above – when I noticed that a swing set mysteriously appeared ahead of me. It was similar to one you might see in a children’s playground, except its chain was unusually long and the whole unit was made of metal that shone a radiant, almost overpowering silver colour. As you would only expect in such a situation, I walked on up to that swing set, sat myself down and started pushing myself to and fro, slowly at first but gradually gaining momentum, swaying like a heavy pendulum in the open air.
And how fresh that air was. You know when you have those breathtaking dreams where you’re flying? Where every molecule of breeze massages your cool skin, you take in the astonishing scenery surrounding you and generally feel like you’re the king of the world? This was one of those dreams. Higher and higher I kept swinging, feeling like I was ten years old again, trying to get so high in the hope that I could defy the laws of gravity and keep the swing revolving around the bar in a constant centifugal motion (that didn’t happen unfortunately, but it was worth a shot!)
I felt so free and refreshed on this swing; it was almost lucid in a way, like I knew that I was in a suspended reality and I could keep this incredible sensation up for as long as I wanted. However as I soon found out, this wasn’t to be…
All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, a set of electrical power lines materialised right in front of me, before my two hallucinatory eyes, suspended between two massive power poles. And I’m not talking about urban-like telegraph poles you might see around the city, I’m talking about those humongous eyesores sticking out of the countryside that carry electricity for hundreds of miles - not unlike this:
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Dreams About Pencils
November 11th, 2008 Posted 8:30 pm
Yesterday while browsing through my phone, I came across a note I had written three nights ago in a state of semi-consciousness which I had completely forgotten about!
It was of a dream I had; there was no memory of any images or vision, merely only four lines of dialogue. I woke up at 5:17am straight after having this dream and wrote the dialogue into my phone, as I thought it was bizzarely interesting and I wanted to remember and analyze it later. The dialogue was as follows:
