Hypnagogicks

When you lie down to sleep or rest, what do you see behind closed eyelids? If you are really tired or have been partying hard, your inner lights may go out right away. However, it’s likely you’ll see and sense a few things, like flashes or light or color or voices that are not in the next room. If you can manage to be drowsy and somewhat attentive at the same time, your impressions may grow. You see geometric patterns or the weave of some fabric. Pictures like children’s drawings or cartoons whiz by, too fast and flimsy for you to catch anything much.

Now there are faces and figures, vivid and alive. It doesn’t feel like you’re looking at them inside your head. It’s more like they are in front of you and around you. Who are all these strangers? You may find yourself shifting from your witness perspective and moving among a crowd. Nobody seems to see you. But wait. Someone is looking at you. The moment of eye contact may startle you out of your excursion. Maybe another time you could risk an encounter with that stranger.

The longer you can maintain a state of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation, in this border state, the more is likely to happen. You’ll enter different landscapes, some wildly beautiful, some otherworldly. You may sense you are moving at increasing speed until you are flying.

You may  step into a drama, a romance or adventure that may mystify you to begin with because it does not correspond to anything familiar to you.

There’s no doubt you are walking on the wild side. Nothing is fixed. An elephant turns into a tuba. A fish leaps in a pool and becomes the pupil of an enormous eye. An octopus turns into a solar disk with multiple arms, like the Aten of ancient Egypt. You watch a tiger chasing a girl, then you become the girl and the tiger, and the tiger is on her, and it’s all good, though when you go to the bathroom you check in the mirror to see whether there is blood around your mouth.

Maybe those flighty figures who come and go in your mind are the Hypnagogics I dreamed about: “They run lightly, playfully, up and down steps and over stoops along my street. They are flying as much as running. They seem light as zephyrs. They are the size of nine-year-old children. I know they are called Hypnagogicks.”

Text adapted from Growing Big Dreams by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing:"HG Eye" by Robert Moss