The Golden Times between Sleep and Awake

 

Iamblichus (c.250-325 CE), the famous philosopher and theurgist descended from the priest-kings of Emesa (in modern Syria) was very clear that the liminal space between sleep and awake is prime time for contact with spiritual guides, such as gods: 

"Either when sleep departs, just as we are awakening, it is possible to hear a sudden voice guiding us about things to be done, or the voices are heard between waking and going to sleep, or even when wholly awake. And sometimes an intangible and incorporeal spirit encircles those lying down, so that there is no visual perception of it, but some other awareness and self-consciousness. When entering, it makes a whooshing sound, and diffuses itself in all directions without any contact, and it does wondrous works by way of freeing both soul and body from their sufferings. 

"At other times, however, when a light shines brightly and peacefully, not only is the sight of the eye possessed, but closed up after previously being quite open. And the other senses are awake and consciously aware of how the gods shine forth in the light, and with a clear understanding they both hear what they say and know what they do."[1]

Iamblichus wrote his book under the pseudonym of an Egyptian priest, Abrammon, maintaining that “the gods are pleased when invoked according to the custom of the Egyptians”. [2] Though he wrote and taught in Greek, he is distinctly less Hellenic that other Neoplatonists. He kept his Semitic name, which is derived from the Syriac or Aramaic ya-mliku, meaning “El is King”. He was descended from the priest-kings of Emesa, some of whom bore his name. Iamblichus I sent troops to support Octavian in the Roman civil war. [3] Iamblichus the theurgist professes great reverence for Egyptian and Chaldean tradition, as opposed to the faddism of the "flight" Hellenes. 

Theurgy means "divine working" and for Iamblichus it was a matter of ritual activity and practice in shifting consciousness, not abstract speculation. The aim was to “rediscover life-giving water hidden in our desert”, to return the soul to knowledge of its greater identity and purpose and lift the individual to the level of a greater self.  This extended to “taking the shapes of the gods” while human, in the body."

 Iamblichus taught that theurgy did not act through the intellect but through one’s entire character “to allow the soul to exchange one life for another, to exchange the mortal life for the life of a god”. [4] In Theurgy and the Soul, Gregory Shaw observes that Iamblichus was  “the first leader of a Platonic school to function simultaneously as hierophant of a sacred cult”.[5] We do not have texts describing the specific ritual practices of that cult, though we know it involved sound and light and telestiké, statue magic, which involved calling the energy of a god or daimon into an image to ensoul it. 

Good to know that this celebrated ancient magician-philosopher also recognized that nightly or morning magic awaits us in that liminal space of “god-sent dreams” between sleep and awake.

References 

1. Iamblichus, De mysteriis trans. Emma C. Clarke John M. Dillon and Jackson P. Hershbell (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003) III.2

2. Marsilio Ficino came up with the title On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians [De mysteriis for short in most references]. Since it was framed as an epistle from an Egyptian priest in response to criticisms from Porphyry, another leading Neoplatonist, its real title would be: “The Reply of the Master Abammon to the Letter of Porphyry”. 

3. John Dillon, “Iamblichus of Chalcis” In Wolfgang Haase (ed.), Philosophie, Wissenschaften, Technik, (New York: De Gruyter, 1987) pp. 863-5

4. Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (Kettering OH: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2014) p.6

5. ibid., pp. 76-7

Photo: The Emesa Helmet. A Roman cavalry helmet with iron face guard covered by a sheet of silver, from the 1st century; found at Homs (ancient Edesa) in 1936.

 

Godspace, between sleep and awake

 

Preparing new classes, I am rereading the 3rd century classic "On the Mysteries", by the Syrian Platonist and theurgist Iamblichus. He surveyed all major forms of divination known in his times and assigned highest importance to what the soul learns in dreams and in liminal states between sleep and awake. Writing about visionary experience in twilight states, he makes it sound like Godspace, prime time for divine encounters:

"Either when sleep departs, just as we are awakening, it is possible to hear a sudden voice guiding us about things to be done, or the voices are heard between waking and going to sleep, or even when wholly awake. And sometimes an intangible and incorporeal spirit encircles those lying down, so that there is no visual perception of it, but some other awareness and self-consciousness.

"When entering, it makes a whooshing sound, and diffuses itself in all directions without any contact, and it does wondrous works by way of freeing both soul and body from their sufferings. At other times, however, when a light shines brightly and peacefully, not only is the sight of the eye possessed, but closed up after previously being quite open. And the other senses are awake and consciously aware of how the gods shine forth in the light, and with a clear understanding they both hear what they say, and know what they do."

- Iamblichus, De mysteriis trans. Emma C. Clarke John M. Dillon and Jackson P. Hershbell (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003)

Graphic: First-century helmet from Emesa (modern Homs) in Syria. Iamblichus was descended from priest-kings of Emesa and kept the non-Hellenic form of his name. Iamblichus (Ἰάμβλιχος)  is the Greek transliteration of Syriac or Aramaic ya-mlku, meaning “He is king”), 

The Place Between Sleep and Awake

"You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you. That's where I'll be waiting."

-                           -  Tinker Bell to Peter Pan in the Hollywood movie 

I have been following these fairy directions for a very long time. If you can train yourself to maintain a state of relaxed attention in this in-between state, called dormiveglia in Italian, you will notice that you may be receiving a whole menu of possibilities for lucid dream adventures. Images, faces, landscapes rise and fall. When you learn to hold one of them in focus, it may become the portal for a conscious journey.
    The Parade of Faces is a frequent phenomenon in this state. You may feel you are among a crowd of people, with faces and figures rushing by. Sometimes one may turn to look at you, which can be an interesting opportunity to enter a shared experience with another dream traveler you may or may not know in ordinary reality.
    Sometimes the images rising and falling before you look like a child's sketches, or cartoons.
    A frequent sighting for me, in this in-between state, is of what initially looks like the weave of a carpet or the mesh of a net. I have come to recognize this as a kind of border between states of reality and consciousness. With intention, I can part the strands and find myself in another order or reality.
    The liminal state of hypnagogia, which I often call the Twilight Zone, is a good place to become aware of your ability to travel beyond the body. I often find myself lifting out of the body quite effortlessly in this state, without bumps and grinds. Sometimes, when tired, I simply rest half in, half out, of my physical form. Sometimes I float up to the ceiling. Quite often I go flying, like a bird, over my sleeping city and to places far away.
    As Tinker Bell counseled, the Place Between Sleep and Awake is, above all, a wonderful place to rendezvous with other beings and other intelligences. It is a state in which we often become away of the psychic activity around us. We may receive visitors, and we will want to learn to screen and discern who we are letting into our space. 
    Often, I find different casts of characters waiting or popping up as I hover on the edge of sleep or linger in the twilight zone of hypnagogia. Sometimes, they appear to be quite literally on stage, or in the wings, waiting for me to show up in order to start or resume a play. More often, they seem to be characters in life dramas that are being played out in other times or in parallel worlds, dramas in which I have a lead role from which I may have been absent while attending to things in my default reality.    The 3rd century philosopher Iamblichus counseled in his treatise On the Mysteries that we should pay special attention to “god-sent experiences” that become available in the “condition between sleeping and waking”. He observed that “when sleep is leaving us, and we are beginning to awake...voices are heard by us” and “sometimes a bright and tranquil light shines forth".
     I frequently have inner dialogues in the Place Between Sleep and Awake, with sources of knowledge I have come to trust. This is a time when I can often receive streams of counsel and information from inner guides. In Dreamgates, I record some of my conversations with the intelligence I decided to call "G2". He carried the vocabulary and knowledge of a great Western Mystery order. I felt he was a transpersonal figure, though in no way alien to me. Many others have come to me in this liminal state. The most important of these inner guides is certainly no stranger; he is a self who observes and operates on a level of reality above the one I inhabit while living on this Earth in a physical body.
    In the history of creative breakthroughs in every field, including science and technology, the hypnagogic state has been of vital importance. In this liminal zone it is easy to make creative connections, which often involves linking things that seem to the routine mind to be unconnected. Many inventions and discoveries attributed to dreams by over-hasty writers - like Kekule's discovery of the benzene ring - are actually gifts brought through from hypnagogia, to such an extent that I call this zone of consciousness "the solution state" in The Secret History of Dreaming.
    The Greek Cypriot author Andreas Mavromatis wrote the only book I know entirely devoted to this liminal state of consciousness, marrying scientific data to rich accounts of creative and visionary accomplishments in this zone. In Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep, originally published in 1987, Mavromatis writes that

“Hypnagogia…facilitates the emergence into consciousness of material that might otherwise remain unconscious. It might, thus, also constitute the platform onto which is periodically raised the substratum of continuous but not always conscious mental activities taking place throughout life. As such, it opens great vistas of psychological exploration. Its introspective study may furnish the individual not only with the benefits of an integrated personality but also with the means of discovering new or little known modes of experiencing which will undoubtedly enrich him/her as a psychological entity.” 

    The Place Between Sleep and Wake can be the very best place to go on with a dream or go back inside one. You may want to practice dream reentry to clarify information from a dream, or get to its full meaning, or continue a conversation with a dream character. You may need to reenter a dream because there are terrors to be overcome, or a mystery to be explored, or simply because you were having fun and adventure and would like to have more. Or because Tinker Bell is waiting for you.
    The Place between Sleep and Awake is the best place to develop the continuity of consciousness prized by advanced practitioners of the yoga of sleep and dreams. I am talking about growing your ability to maintain awareness and witness perspective as you move back and forth between sleep, half-sleep, dream, lucid dreaming, what Sri Aurobindo called “the sleep of experiences” and the dream of everyday life.
     For me, it is less interesting to wake up to the fact that I am dreaming than to be able to observe myself and be fully aware that at every turning in any state of being and consciousness, I have the power to choose what I will do and to test the limits of any reality.

Image: album cover for "Dormiveglia" (8 Tracks Radio)

Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Your Launch Pad for Lucid Dreaming

The easiest way to embark on lucid dreaming is to practice maintaining awareness as dream images rise and fall during twilight states between sleep and waking.The twilight zone offers optimum conditions to develop your ability to make intentional journeys beyond the physical body to learn the nature and conditions of other orders of reality. 

     As you spend more time in the twilight zone, you will discover a notable increase in both your creativity and your psychic awareness. Going with the flow of spontaneous imagery in the twilight zone puts you into the stream of the creative process. It puts you in league with your creative source, mediated by mentors who appear to you in the half-dream state, or coming through cool and clear as a mountain spring. It is no accident that highly creative people — from Einstein to the romance writer and the powerboat designer I met on recent plane trips — are very much at home in the twilight zone

      In the language of the sleep scientists, the twilight zone is the realm of hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences. Hypnagogic literally means “leading toward sleep”; hypnopompic means “leading away from sleep.” But these terms do not take us to the heart of the matter. You may enter the twilight zone before and after sleep, but you may also enter it wide awake, with no intention of sleeping.
      It is not the relationship to sleep that defines the twilight zone; it is its character as a border county. It is the junction between sleep and waking, certainly. But more than this, as Mary Watkins wrote beautifully in Waking Dreams, it is “the plane of coexistence of the two worlds." In this borderland, you will find the gates to other worlds opening smoothly and fluidly — if you let them and are prepared for what may follow.
      When I allow myself to drift through this frontier region with no fixed agenda, I have the sense of leaning through a window or a doorway in space. Sometimes this feels like hanging out of the open hatch of an airplane. I have come to recognize this as the opening of a dreamgate. Depending on circumstances and intention, I can step forward into the next dimension or haul myself back into physical focus.

      From this departure lobby, the great explorers of the imaginal realm have used many gates and flight paths. This is why the twilight state has such vital significance in dream yoga, in shamanic training, in the Western Mystery traditions, in the “science of mirrors” of the medieval Persian philosophers, and in other schools of active spirituality.

     According to Tantric teachings, it is by learning to prolong this “intermediate state” and to operate with full awareness within it that you achieve dream mastery and, beyond this, the highest level of consciousness attainable for an embodied human. The Spandakarika of Vasagupta, which dates from the tenth century, recommends the use of breathing exercises to focus and maintain awareness as you move from waking into the twilight state. The dreamer is urged to place himself “at the junction between inhaled and exhaled breaths, at the very point where he enters into contact with energy in the pure state.” This is the entry into conscious dreaming, whose gifts (according to Tantric text) could be immense: “The Lord of necessity grants him during dreams the ends he pursues, providing that he is profoundly contemplative and places himself at the junction between waking and sleeping."

     The aim of the practice is to achieve continuity of consciousness through sleeping, waking, and the intermediate state. When this is attained, the practitioner has ascended to the mystical Fourth State — the turiya of the Upanishads. This is the highly evolved consciousness of a person who has awakened to the reality of the Self; it now infuses his awareness at all times.

     In the Greco-Roman world, the twilight zone was a place of rendezvous with divine messengers and even the gods themselves. Iamblichus, the author of an important book on the Mysteries, urged the need to pay special attention to “god-sent dreams” in the intermediate state, especially after waking:

“They come when sleep is leaving us, or we are just waking. We may hear a certain voice that tells us concisely what needs to be done. Sometimes we feel surrounded by a presence that cannot be perceived by the sight, but is sensed in other ways. The entrance of the spirit is accompanied by a noise….But sometimes a bright and tranquil light shines forth.”

From the ascent to the Fourth State to a walk-in by a spirit or daimon, there is clearly no ceiling on possibility in this area. But first and last, experiment in the twilight zone is wonderful fun. Think of this as your cosmic playground. 

Adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing: "The Moon Is At the Foot of My Bed" by RM