Hypnagogic Dreams
“As soon as my head hit the pillow I started to drift off into that marginal place that you enter between wakefulness and dreams. I wasn’t out and yet I wasn’t fully awake—it’s that moment when your mind is just opening up—and I saw this image. Of sailors. They were Yankee sailors hauling something out of the jungle. It was in a crate” (120).
In Naomi Epel’s fascinating compilation of writers’ dreams in Writers Dreaming, Charles Johnson described how he felt that something was missing in the draft of the novel he was working on. As he fell asleep, Johnson experienced a hypnagogic dream that inspired him to write a scene that would provide the impetus for much of the dramatic action of the award-winning novel, Middle Passage.
Hypnagogia is a space of loose, less structured waking thought occurring as a dreamer drifts off to sleep, and right before he or she becomes fully awake (Hartmann 90). 
These dreams can shed light on how inspiration may strike as we fall asleep or immediately after we awaken. During this stage, the dreamer is semi-conscious— half-awake, half-asleep as images flicker through the mind. During a hypnagogic hallucination, “some of the physiological mechanisms of REM sleep persist after they would normally shut down” (101). In one sense, hypnagogic hallucinations are the dreams closest to waking. Because of the intriguing implications of this dreamlike state, researchers have used it to help them understand dream images and problem solving. Research shows how hypnagogic images can improve mental activity and access memories and images for our use.
In the October 2000 issue of Science, researchers from Harvard Medical School published the results of a study about the role that the brain plays in hypnagogic images during sleep onset. Robert Stickgold and his colleagues taught twenty-seven participants to play the computer game Tetris. The subjects played the game for seven hours over a span of three days. Each night, they were awakened during three states: REM, NREM and the hypnagogic period at sleep onset. After each awakening, researchers prompted the subjects to record what they saw in their minds.
The findings were illuminating: the participants reported “intrusive, stereotypical, visual images of the game at sleep onset” (350). The hypnagogic images were strikingly similar in each dreamer—most dreamed of Tetris pieces, usually falling down a screen (351). Most importantly, the subjects increased their scores significantly. These results suggest that the residue from waking life is worked on in dreaming life and can be accessed by dreamers to improve their performance. This is especially true of an activity to which a dreamer devotes a lot of waking hours. Because of the intensive mental process of their work, writers may end up dreaming about their projects. They may dream about a character, setting, or emotion in the manuscript they are writing.
A hypnagogic state may help a writer think more creatively because they integrate characteristics of both unconscious and conscious activity. According to Dr. Deirdre Barrett of Harvard University, there are two modes of thinking: primary and secondary. Primary thinking involves the visual, intuitive, and emotional. Barrett associates this mode with the bizarre, illogical, and unnerving REM state. On the contrary, secondary thinking is logical, linear, and focused (87). Barrett asserts that hypnagogic dreams combine elements from both primary and secondary modes, creating a state of interaction and evaluation that is a catalyst for creativity.
Read more:
Introduction--The Committee of Sleep
Dream Incubation
REM--Making the Connection
REM--The Royal Road to Metaphor
Hypnagogic Dreams
Writer's Block
The Little People
Suggested Reading
Links
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