It’s funny. I am currently on hour 36 or so of being awake due to work and a family emergency. I am hereafter attempting to relate a story about something that happened in the past while I was exhausted while currently being exhausted. I should get some kind of screenplay credit for Inception II.
Once long ago while I was in college I had a kind of hypnotic collapse while driving my very long commute after days of little sleep. I wasn’t aware of the shift in my consciousness until after I’d parked at my school and in retrospect I was fortunate not to have crashed. I remember distinctly first having the idea, then the very lucid experience of being on a kind of job interview in a strange building, where I was given a list of strange instructions involving getting onto an elevator, going to designated floors, and performing some action or recording some observation. I had no real sense of this building as a real space- how big it was, how the floors related to one another, etc., but I remember somehow understanding which buttons to push on the elevator and what I was to do on each floor. The phenomena that greeted me on each floor varied. Sometimes I saw nothing at all. On one floor I distinctly remember a disturbing puddle of some fluid on the floor, next to which I placed a warning sign. Other floors greeted me with screams and other odd noises. I had the distinct sense I was being monitored for compliance. Apart from that I remember little, as it was a long time ago and very much akin to a waking dream.
I remember being in a kind of haze after I snapped out of it, not at all like waking up, but like recalling something that had just happened while processing that it could not have happened at the same time. It probably didn’t help that the two classes I was taking at the time were Myth Theory and Myth and Society, both of which pushed the kind of deep thinking buttons that would result in prolonging the unease. For my part, I didn’t find the episode pleasant at all and while I suppose I could have gotten some kind of story out of it a la Coleridge and Kubla Khan, I personally hope I never experience such things again.
I’ve done entire hours of driving without remembering it. This sort of thing only happens to me behind the wheel.
Now, as far as entering into a hypnogogic state deliberately for creative purposes, I did it on a bus in South Africa back in 2015. Another car connections: if I’m a passenger in a motor vehicle, I have difficulty seating awake. Anyway, I’d read about how Thomas Edison would do something to keep himself from totally falling asleep, like holding a ball over a pail of water: he’d let go of the ball when he fell asleep and the splash would wake him up. So I held my car keys over the seat’s edge and put myself into a trance, focusing on a bit of music I’d been working on in my head. It was really cool and I was able to enter that state and remember what I was working on because I didn’t fall asleep . . . but I was on a bus and had nothing to record it with.
I've read a bit about Lynch and TM and tried it a few times to somewhat interesting results, but I'm not familliar with Kary Mullis so I will look into him right now.
As long as you do not get obsessed with hanging yourself...
Meta-oneiromancy.
At least I'm not reading Land.
It’s funny. I am currently on hour 36 or so of being awake due to work and a family emergency. I am hereafter attempting to relate a story about something that happened in the past while I was exhausted while currently being exhausted. I should get some kind of screenplay credit for Inception II.
Once long ago while I was in college I had a kind of hypnotic collapse while driving my very long commute after days of little sleep. I wasn’t aware of the shift in my consciousness until after I’d parked at my school and in retrospect I was fortunate not to have crashed. I remember distinctly first having the idea, then the very lucid experience of being on a kind of job interview in a strange building, where I was given a list of strange instructions involving getting onto an elevator, going to designated floors, and performing some action or recording some observation. I had no real sense of this building as a real space- how big it was, how the floors related to one another, etc., but I remember somehow understanding which buttons to push on the elevator and what I was to do on each floor. The phenomena that greeted me on each floor varied. Sometimes I saw nothing at all. On one floor I distinctly remember a disturbing puddle of some fluid on the floor, next to which I placed a warning sign. Other floors greeted me with screams and other odd noises. I had the distinct sense I was being monitored for compliance. Apart from that I remember little, as it was a long time ago and very much akin to a waking dream.
I remember being in a kind of haze after I snapped out of it, not at all like waking up, but like recalling something that had just happened while processing that it could not have happened at the same time. It probably didn’t help that the two classes I was taking at the time were Myth Theory and Myth and Society, both of which pushed the kind of deep thinking buttons that would result in prolonging the unease. For my part, I didn’t find the episode pleasant at all and while I suppose I could have gotten some kind of story out of it a la Coleridge and Kubla Khan, I personally hope I never experience such things again.
I’ve done entire hours of driving without remembering it. This sort of thing only happens to me behind the wheel.
Now, as far as entering into a hypnogogic state deliberately for creative purposes, I did it on a bus in South Africa back in 2015. Another car connections: if I’m a passenger in a motor vehicle, I have difficulty seating awake. Anyway, I’d read about how Thomas Edison would do something to keep himself from totally falling asleep, like holding a ball over a pail of water: he’d let go of the ball when he fell asleep and the splash would wake him up. So I held my car keys over the seat’s edge and put myself into a trance, focusing on a bit of music I’d been working on in my head. It was really cool and I was able to enter that state and remember what I was working on because I didn’t fall asleep . . . but I was on a bus and had nothing to record it with.
That's something that I am keeping in mind.
I've read a bit about Lynch and TM and tried it a few times to somewhat interesting results, but I'm not familliar with Kary Mullis so I will look into him right now.