Welcome to the Twilight Zone

The liminal state of hypnagogia, when you are drifting between sleep and awake, or between waking and sleep, is a marvelous launchpad for lucid dreaming. If you can train yourself to maintain a state of relaxed attention in this in-between state, 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.

    This liminal state, which I also call the twilight zone, is a good place to become aware of the 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 and half out of my physical form. Sometimes I float up to the ceiling. In my second body, I may go through a series of simple kinesthetics before becoming airborne
    As I drift toward sleep in the twilight zone, I may notice that a second version of myself, in a different form, is waking up. One night, as I flirted with sleep, I became aware that I was lying back-to-back on the bed with a maned lion stirring from his nap as I slumbered. Quite often I go flying, like a bird, over a landscape, to places far away.

   The twilight zone of hypnagogia is a wonderful place to rendezvous with other beings and other intelligences. It is a state in which we often become aware 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, because to be open to all comers is like opening your doors and windows in a city at night  and hanging out signs saying, “Party! Come on In! Everyone Welcome!”

    I frequently have inner dialogues in the twilight zone, 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 overhasty writers — like Kekulé’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 my Secret History of Dreaming.

     The place between sleep and awake can also 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.

     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 after waking. 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.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: With Lion at the Night Cinema. Drawing by Robert Moss from adventures in the twilight state