"As legend goes, Edison would sit in a chair when he got sleepy, holding a ball bearing in his left hand. Soon, he would enter the “hypnagogic state,” a stage between wakefulness and sleep where many people claim to have visual and auditory hallucinations."
This technique should work if you can fall asleep without consciously thinking about what is in your hand. I have taken naps at 3pm now and then when I'm exhausted from studying a problem and fall asleep. Recently in a nap dream I come to a part that seemed to beg my belief even while dreaming. And I was somehow able to arise out of my dream state with conscious effort. I should note that I have been quite productive with the problem I was considering. I can't remember what the problem was. I just saw the article and thought it would be fun to share.
Edison's technique should be automatic. Maybe something like a soft object that when a few moments after it is released makes a squeak sound. Might make a fun toy for inventors looking to maximize on this dream boost effect.
>Maybe something like a soft object that when a few moments after it is released makes a squeak sound.
Could use some kind of heat or capacitive touch sensor to detect when it's no longer in contact with your hand. Or I guess the KISS version of that would just be to use some sort of physical switch to detect when the object hits the floor. I could totally see there being a market for something like this!
I spent a bit of time trying to do it with flex sensors. Strap one to your hand, make a fist, take your nap, detect when muscle tone is lost and it unbends. I ran out of interest before I got it to work but I still think it's viable. Probably smart to build the flex sensor into a glove for ease of use, and you could put the microcontroller on there too.
You could also buy one of those two-piece door sensors that sound an alarm when you separate them. Tie one to your hand (or glue it onto a special sleeping glove), and hold the other piece.
Only potential problem is that you might get a heart attack considering how loud those things can be.
The hypnagogic state sucks. I used to often wake from nightmares during the night and see hundreds of spiders swarming all over my bedroom. I would stand on my bed and try to figure out how to get to the door. I injured myself a couple of times doing Bruce Lee shit trying to jump across furniture without touching the spiders. I would switch the light on and of course there are no spiders there, but my brain is so convinced by the hallucination that it has to try and reconcile the insanity and then has me looking under the bed where the spiders have surely hidden as soon as the light went on.
Then 30 seconds later my brain goes "lolol, just fucking with you, bro" and I feel really stupid.
this recently happened to me for the first time ever and it was surreal and terrifying, except in my situation is was bedbugs, not spiders. Never had it happen before until randomly a few weeks ago when i was feeling stressed about moving into a new apartment in a new city far away. Woke up sweating and was hallucinating that my room was infested. It was horrifying.
> Recently in a nap dream I come to a part that seemed to beg my belief even while dreaming. And I was somehow able to arise out of my dream state with conscious effort.
I've had a similar experience, where discrepancies in dream raised consciousness and morphed into lucid dreaming. In time I've become better at working out dreams from reality, and decided reversed to trigger it voluntarily. To bad with age I almost stopped dreaming, it was great.
It might be extremely personal, but my best trigger was imagining walking down an infinite stair above a cloudy sky right before sleeping - imagination transitioning into dreaming as it went. I would regularly misstep and fall - either the body would twitch waking me up, or I'd be falling in the empty below, the impossibility of the situation awakening consciousness in the dream. Had to be timed right tho - too early and would have just been just me imagining things. The feeling of lucid dreaming is distinct enough to tell which is which tho, so I could just attempt it over and over until it worked or I'd miss the window and just feel asleep.
> It might be extremely personal, but my best trigger was imagining walking down an infinite stair above a cloudy sky right before sleeping - imagination transitioning into dreaming as it went.
I remember doing almost this exact thing as a child! Every night I'd fall asleep thinking of descending an infinite escalator, which existed in an empty space. Sometimes I was with other people, sometimes alone, but I found that by keeping the escalator in focus, I was able to switch into what now I realize was a lucid dream, right as I was falling asleep.
One of my friends volunteered for an experiment with this a few years back and said it was pretty trippy. Not sure how the project has progressed since then though.
I just had this happen to me tonight. I was dreaming and then I started dreaming about mom's house. The sliding door was open and there was hurricane like wind outside. I cried out mom! I could feel the wind. It felt so real! I woke up and heard the city's warning siren say severe thunderstorm warning. Apparently it was very windy outside last night as my neighbors remarked today.
This is absolutely fascinating. I'm really interested to learn why this seems to work so reliably well. What's going on on a chemical/electrical level in the brain during N1 sleep that gives it this unique ability, and why does it go away if you go too deep and enter N2 sleep?
Also, I'm incredibly eager to try this out now. First I've heard of it and it seems too good to be true.
I was also amazed when I could solve logic puzzles (it was a logic game) after having looked at it[1] for a couple of seconds. I cannot/could not explain how I solved it, I could not tell you in advance that I have to move left, then right to connect this and that and so forth, but after having looked at it for a couple of seconds, I pressed the keys "intuitively" and solved it! I did not believe that it really worked at first, but after I solved many difficult levels this way, I was pleasantly shocked. I remember being somewhat sleep deprived at that time as well.
[1] As in... simply looked. I did not try to solve it consciously.
I've had a similar experience but, but my takeaway was: what does it mean to solve something? Consciously? You still skip so many steps; often, I think we just "think through" the state of the puzzle in order to load its configuration; the solution pops into our head, which then think through again - and we call it conscious thought. It's like an idea popping into your head: You instantly take credit for it, but frankly, did you come up with the idea? Didn't you just start feeling like you got something and you started talking, and the words kept making sense? lmao
Looks like the brain has several layers of conscious states. The brain consumes many calories and thinking hard can make you tired. Especially if you have been very productive for a long time and then hit a wall. At the point of mental exhaustion, the brain desires sleep. You fall asleep and begin having a psychosis. The brain uses symbols that represent the psychosis causing hallucination. There is something about breaking the psychosis at the right time that alleviates some mental problems. Disclosure: I'm bipolar. I have some experience with psychosis I can tell you! All dreams are like psychoses..
I also have some personal experience with psychosis, although I don't want to disclose it on HN. How do you personally know when you're done experiencing it and have "returned to normal"?
It depends on how deep it is. At a certain depth the only thing that can alert you (if you have it as a tenancy like I do) is the reactions of other people. THC can amplify the effect but CBD can dampen it. I don't know why I use either. I'm just imperfect that way. I'm bad to the bone.
The formal definition according to Google is "a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality", so I guess technically, a dream meets that definition.
I think the commenter you're responding to is also referring to the way that in a psychotic state, all actions make sense to the psychotic person. The "psycho" stops following a deductive/conscious/scientific logic chain, and starts following inductive/subconscious/superstitious logic chain, all while perceiving internally a consistent narrative of reality.
Examples in the difference in logic chains:
- In a non-psychotic state, when I'm in my bedroom and notice that I am cold, I do not start a fire, because (a) fire is dangerous inside; (b) I remember that I have blankets, an HVAC system, etc.
- In a psychotic state (either dreaming or awake), when I'm in my bedroom and notice that I am cold, I might start a fire, because (a) an angel told me to; (b) it will protect me from the spirits in the darkness; (c) I believe the heating system is broken (even if I haven't looked at it) and I'm worried I'll freeze to death...
One cannot personally perceive psychosis while psychotic--reality always makes sense in the moment. Even the most demented Alzheimer's patient will construct a narrative of what's happening to them, even if it's just a vague sense of prehistoric fear and rage at the strange object invading their space (which in reality is a nurse trying to give them a bath).
I imagine you already know this but in case anyone who's reading doesn't: people who are labelled as "bipolar" uncontrollably enter mental states of varying degrees of psychosis where they often perform actions that hurt themselves and others, and then eventually they "return to reality" and are frequently horrified to discover what it is they've done. The "return to reality" sometimes requires medication and therapy. Observe: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-would-like-closure-bu....
It's not all bad for people who are diagnosed bipolar, though--sometimes instead of anger or fear, a manic/bipolar person experiences happiness/love/joy and creates a great work of art or makes everyone around them feel really good. I doubt that most bipolar-diagnosed people enjoy the down-swings, though, and I suspect most would rather be rid of their "condition".
Another, slightly-related example about how psychosis works: if you understand a concept perfectly when someone else explains it, and you can't explain it to yourself once they're gone, you've experienced your mind perceive what appeared to be "reality" but was not, in fact, real. While the explainer was talking to you, you perceived that you understood the concept, and you experienced the sensation of understanding, but since you didn't actually understand, you were in a state not completely like but similar to what is call psychosis.
> Luckily for Einstein, he also took regular naps. According to apocryphal legend, to make sure he didn’t overdo it he’d recline in his armchair with a spoon in his hand and a metal plate directly beneath. He’d allow himself to drift off for a second, then – bam! – the spoon would fall from his hand and the sound of it hitting the plate would wake him up
Sometimes I get into what feels like similar state during meditation, particularly when tired. It definitely produces "different" thoughts, but I never thought of it this way. Interesting.
For years this has been a personal joy of cycling to work...arriving at work with a thousand ideas of how to solve various challenges, and returning home scrambling for a notebook to capture the wild thoughts that emerged on the last half of the journey.
I have some success with the TM technique, some days I'm just drained and don't want to do anything and after 20 minutes of TM in the afternoon I spring up and engage in hobbies or social activities as if it was a new day. It's better than a nap, which just gets rid of the heavy bodied tiredness. I also tried mindfulness before but I feel I get kinda like the creativity boost but not the rested state.
Transcendental Meditation. It's a more passive way of meditation than mindfulness that was kinda like a big I thing I think in the 70s or something? A lot of rich people are into it, most notable David Lynch and I think Jim Carrey... they have good marketing and it's kinda expensive if you are on a high earning bracket but of the woo woo weird things I spent money on it's one I don't regret.
This sleep technique can be easily replicated in modern life: work from home, have lunch then a lie-down then have the Teams app's blippedy blip blip blip incoming message audio notifications wake you up to the harsh world of reality.
Haven't felt this leads to me feeling especially creative, though.
I think I once got into this hypnagogic state by accident. I was having a nap and my dogs woke me up because it was time for their walk.
I felt sleepy while walking the dogs but also had a clarity regarding anything I examined in my mind. It's as if my regular state of mind was like walking in a forest with limited visibility, and now I could see the territory from a bird's perspective.
This lasted for about 15 mins maybe. I've never been able to experience this again. Maybe I should try this technique :)
And then a dozen others will jump in saying that regardless of the actual authenticity of the experience it doesn't count if you did it by directly altering brain chemistry rather than indirectly altering brain chemistry.
I'm definitely not qualified to claim what's the right and wrong way of doing it but I've never dedicated even a single day solely on meditation in my life.
Usually I was kind of like "phew, I feel tired and stressed, time to lay down with eyes closed for a bit", and it all evolved naturally from there (similarly to the so-called power naps of 30 minutes).
So at least the key for my success in mediation was to treat it like a damage mitigation technique and nothing else. And for me that works very well.
I enter such state quite often, as a result of a pattern I used to enter lucid dreams when younger I can recognize and voluntarily drift into 'aware naps' - apparently based on wife feedback I can do everything from chores to rocking my daughter bed but speech patterns are garbled, even if internally I hear the conversation and interiorly think coherent answers. She just has to wake me and I can immediately and accurately answer.
People would think narcolepsy or sleepwalking, but it's voluntary, I keep memories, and keep doing whatever I need to be doing.
I experienced such states on several occasions, usually randomly once every two or three years. I resolved to explore it if it happened again, and sure enough I was ready when it did.
I soon discovered you don't have to wait years; it can happen a few times a week.
Simple technique:
- wait until you've woken up after a dream. (so technically hypnopompic, not hypnagogic, but more powerful imho)
- Any dream will do, but be careful not to drift back into normal consciousness (so don't think of work, taxes, todo's, etc)
- instead, imagine something fanciful. Like swinging at a baseball in dodger stadium in slow-motion, or, my favorite, imagining you have the worlds smallest record player between your fingers & playing a song you like (funk music is good for this)
- stay with the humorous feeling, let it grow awhile
- after a minute or two, you should find the dream state has stabilized
- once it's stable, and only then, call up a problem or life situation you'd like insight into, or just explore the landscape (what's behind that circus tent?)
- try not to get too intellectual or willful, it can dispel the state
NB: no drugs required. But caffeine in the evening can increase the odds of waking after dreaming.
What worked for me years ago was writing down my dreams. After a while I got really good at recalling them and even lucid dreaming at times. It was really cool, but I was single. Now I wouldn't want to wake my wife.
I used to do that and I had to stop because my recall of the dreams was so detailed that it took me an hour to write it all down in the morning. The details were too vivid to gloss over or not write down, and eventually I wanted that hour back so I stopped writing the dreams down. It was very cool while I was doing it though.
I feel it sometimes when I think about holding the mouse, it feels like my teeth are extremely large and my hands are crazy tiny heaving the mouse along.
your thing on smallest record players between fingers really described that feeling for me, very cool.
This is essentially lucid dream induction. Lucid dreaming is when you become conscious that you're dreaming while dreaming... and once you are consciously dreaming you can direct the dream actively rather than experiencing it passively. This can happen spontaneously during sleep, or it can be induced with techniques such as what you're describing.
I wonder if other changes, not just sleep, but quick changes to environment can create this effect as well.
Your description regarding the feeling you had walking your dogs is very similar to something which happened to me once just as I was leaving work, as I was walking out of my office.
As I walked out the door, everything felt very crisp, my mind felt lighter, and it was as if my senses were working at 200%. At that time I believe I experienced that same "clarity regarding anything I examined in my mind" you described. I thought about several things and knew in that moment exactly what needed to be done in each of them, with what felt like more than absolute certainty. It only lasted a few minutes, and had left by the time I returned home.
It's never happened again. When I think back on that day, I can almost feel it, like I'm grasping at that sense of clarity, but it always remains out of reach.
> I thought about several things and knew in that moment exactly what needed to be done in each of them, with what felt like more than absolute certainty.
I had a very similar experience walking out of a movie theater after watching a particularly good movie this year. I walked around the main street in my town and it saw it from completely new eyes, and was able to appreciate everything about it without any prior opinions or memories about all the restaurants and shops on the block. It was surreal.
I also was able to, just like you said, become aware of a couple of large life problems that I had been unconsciously ignoring, and felt such a serene sense of "absolute certainty" about what I wanted to do about them
If I could just have that state 3-4 times a year! It was genuinely magical
> To use the technique, visionaries such as Dalí and Edison would hold an object, such as a spoon or a ball, while falling asleep in a chair.
This one isn't going to work for me, I think. I can never fall asleep in chairs or anywhere except comfortably lying down. Perhaps I could try holding one arm with a ball in it off the edge of the bed.
I don’t know if this is precisely that state but I’ve found that when I drift off while reading, there will be a moment where the text melds with the dream state. A text on surveillance capitalism will sudden include a narrative or will merge with something else that I’ve read.
Dreams are such a lovely experience. I love recounting them and the corresponding dream logic. I especially treasure filmmakers who can recreate that dream feeling. Fellini comes to mind.
I use the hypnogagic state as part of my meditation routine.
I always shower before bed and that's when I tend to start getting sleepy. So I started meditating during that time.
I can get to the phase of seeing shifting colors and patterns very easily in this setup. I've been able to get there outside the hypnogagic state but only with some difficulty and not consistently.
Meditation is about being alert and present. Hypnagogia in my experience is a hindrance that impedes meditation progress since it dulls the senses and experience.
If your goal is to be aware of yourself in the immediate, to feel things directly, then the hypnogagic state can work well. Obviously your mileage may vary.
Mindful meditation, a technique very popular among big tech HR departments that want alert and present employees, is about being alert and present. There's many techniques and first hand stories of people achieving states more similar to like the one in the article with more let's say "older" or simpler and more basic meditation techniques that don't require too much mental gymnastics. Bodhidharma staring at a wall comes to mind.
We did that in high school physics. Physics was last period and before swim practice. We'd put a pencil in our hands and dangle our hand off the edge of the desk. When you dropped your pencil it'd wake you up. Hopefully it'd wake you up so the team wouldn't skeak off an leave you sleeping in the physics lab.
I suppose that dropping of the pencil is caused by muscles relaxing. I'm surprised a smartwatch can't detect this relaxation. But perhaps it's at the wrong location for that.
Is this a legit question? Instead of trying to sleep in an awkward position where you can drop something and have it wake you up, you could sleep in your bed and be woken up at the right time.
This may have to do with being relaxed, not really thinking about the problem at hand and letting your intuition take over. I have had experiences where working intensely on a problem, even for weeks, didn't solve it but walking away from it and being totally relaxed and the solution just popped in my head. It could be in a shower, having a meal with friends, in the middle of the night or on a walk. You already have the necessary facts and observations but somehow you have not made that last intuitive leap. And when you do, you instantly know it is right as all of a sudden the cloud of possibilities collapses to a single point!
I don't think of it as creativity as much as sparking one's intuition. The "sleep technique" test also relies pattern recognition, which is sort of a limited creativity. You are making the final connection as opposed to opening up a whole new world of possibilities.
I often have really good ideas under the shower that eluded me while thinking hard about it at my desk. I really wonder when they can reproduce the creative boost of taking a shower in a lab experiment.
Let's say Edison created none of his lab's inventions. But it was still a lab he put together, was it not? He should get some credit -- so should the individual inventors, no doubt, but the question is just how visionary Edison was, and if his only real vision was creating a lab, hiring, and so on, then visionary he most definitely was.
I have always felt that Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison are two sides of one coin... it seems that both of their successes are related to the mix of a driving vision, controversial management style and relentless push for innovation. Different eras, similar results...
Culminating ideas to place items in a market place and market them to be desirable to the public, while electrocuting elephants is hard work for any man.
I once fell asleep while coming down from LSD and woke up with sleep paralysis. I was wide awake, still buzzed from the acid and completely paralyzed. Fortunately I didn't panic despite not knowing about sleep paralysis and thinking the LSD had paralyzed me. It took me awhile but I managed to shake myself into movement finally.
Both Dali and Edison did not have families and children to rise. They were multimillionaries also. If you are also childless and multimillionaire, you can experiment with what essentially a sleep deprivation, having hallutinations that are useful in a work of... genius?
Also, in case of Edison, he used an army of assistants to comb through his ideas and patents avaiable at the time to find what is useful. Again, a privilege of multimillionaire
These techniques cannot be used by a person who have to walk a dog early every morning, help his son to go to a school and work with complex code base.
A comment from a passerby. You say it like this is something you don’t have agency over (at least early on). It’s like saying that “yeah, you cannot be a good painter if you are solving math problems all the time”. Same with childless multimillionaires - it’s not like you are born into being one.
You could quite easily use this technique when your child is in bed, before your usual bedtime. It would be an interesting thing to try in the evening when you're stuck on a coding problem.
It's only really useful if you can get to that stage of N1 sleep quite quickly anyway so it wouldn't apply to all people. I don't think it's the domain of childless millionaires.
> These techniques cannot be used by a person who have to walk a dog early every morning, help his son to go to a school and work with complex code base.
Of course they can. Just not by you. Mutual exclusion does not apply here.
245 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadhttps://cityftmyers.com/1871/Standing-Thomas-Edison#:~:text=....
This technique should work if you can fall asleep without consciously thinking about what is in your hand. I have taken naps at 3pm now and then when I'm exhausted from studying a problem and fall asleep. Recently in a nap dream I come to a part that seemed to beg my belief even while dreaming. And I was somehow able to arise out of my dream state with conscious effort. I should note that I have been quite productive with the problem I was considering. I can't remember what the problem was. I just saw the article and thought it would be fun to share.
Edison's technique should be automatic. Maybe something like a soft object that when a few moments after it is released makes a squeak sound. Might make a fun toy for inventors looking to maximize on this dream boost effect.
Could use some kind of heat or capacitive touch sensor to detect when it's no longer in contact with your hand. Or I guess the KISS version of that would just be to use some sort of physical switch to detect when the object hits the floor. I could totally see there being a market for something like this!
https://core-electronics.com.au/flex-sensor-2-2.html
Only potential problem is that you might get a heart attack considering how loud those things can be.
Then 30 seconds later my brain goes "lolol, just fucking with you, bro" and I feel really stupid.
I've had a similar experience, where discrepancies in dream raised consciousness and morphed into lucid dreaming. In time I've become better at working out dreams from reality, and decided reversed to trigger it voluntarily. To bad with age I almost stopped dreaming, it was great.
It might be extremely personal, but my best trigger was imagining walking down an infinite stair above a cloudy sky right before sleeping - imagination transitioning into dreaming as it went. I would regularly misstep and fall - either the body would twitch waking me up, or I'd be falling in the empty below, the impossibility of the situation awakening consciousness in the dream. Had to be timed right tho - too early and would have just been just me imagining things. The feeling of lucid dreaming is distinct enough to tell which is which tho, so I could just attempt it over and over until it worked or I'd miss the window and just feel asleep.
I remember doing almost this exact thing as a child! Every night I'd fall asleep thinking of descending an infinite escalator, which existed in an empty space. Sometimes I was with other people, sometimes alone, but I found that by keeping the escalator in focus, I was able to switch into what now I realize was a lucid dream, right as I was falling asleep.
One of my friends volunteered for an experiment with this a few years back and said it was pretty trippy. Not sure how the project has progressed since then though.
Also, I'm incredibly eager to try this out now. First I've heard of it and it seems too good to be true.
[1] As in... simply looked. I did not try to solve it consciously.
I think the commenter you're responding to is also referring to the way that in a psychotic state, all actions make sense to the psychotic person. The "psycho" stops following a deductive/conscious/scientific logic chain, and starts following inductive/subconscious/superstitious logic chain, all while perceiving internally a consistent narrative of reality.
Examples in the difference in logic chains:
- In a non-psychotic state, when I'm in my bedroom and notice that I am cold, I do not start a fire, because (a) fire is dangerous inside; (b) I remember that I have blankets, an HVAC system, etc.
- In a psychotic state (either dreaming or awake), when I'm in my bedroom and notice that I am cold, I might start a fire, because (a) an angel told me to; (b) it will protect me from the spirits in the darkness; (c) I believe the heating system is broken (even if I haven't looked at it) and I'm worried I'll freeze to death...
One cannot personally perceive psychosis while psychotic--reality always makes sense in the moment. Even the most demented Alzheimer's patient will construct a narrative of what's happening to them, even if it's just a vague sense of prehistoric fear and rage at the strange object invading their space (which in reality is a nurse trying to give them a bath).
I imagine you already know this but in case anyone who's reading doesn't: people who are labelled as "bipolar" uncontrollably enter mental states of varying degrees of psychosis where they often perform actions that hurt themselves and others, and then eventually they "return to reality" and are frequently horrified to discover what it is they've done. The "return to reality" sometimes requires medication and therapy. Observe: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-would-like-closure-bu....
It's not all bad for people who are diagnosed bipolar, though--sometimes instead of anger or fear, a manic/bipolar person experiences happiness/love/joy and creates a great work of art or makes everyone around them feel really good. I doubt that most bipolar-diagnosed people enjoy the down-swings, though, and I suspect most would rather be rid of their "condition".
Another, slightly-related example about how psychosis works: if you understand a concept perfectly when someone else explains it, and you can't explain it to yourself once they're gone, you've experienced your mind perceive what appeared to be "reality" but was not, in fact, real. While the explainer was talking to you, you perceived that you understood the concept, and you experienced the sensation of understanding, but since you didn't actually understand, you were in a state not completely like but similar to what is call psychosis.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170612-what-you-can-lea...
Haven't felt this leads to me feeling especially creative, though.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. [rev 16:20]
First blip: Don't care
Second blip: Holy moly, is the world on fire?
What you need for this if it's real is your fitbit to wake you at the exact time, or perhaps something that measure muscle tension or brain waves.
I felt sleepy while walking the dogs but also had a clarity regarding anything I examined in my mind. It's as if my regular state of mind was like walking in a forest with limited visibility, and now I could see the territory from a bird's perspective.
This lasted for about 15 mins maybe. I've never been able to experience this again. Maybe I should try this technique :)
BRB, trying.
It's certainly possible I was doing it wrong though, but even in one of those 12 day silent Vipassana retreats I never got that kind of clarity.
Usually I was kind of like "phew, I feel tired and stressed, time to lay down with eyes closed for a bit", and it all evolved naturally from there (similarly to the so-called power naps of 30 minutes).
So at least the key for my success in mediation was to treat it like a damage mitigation technique and nothing else. And for me that works very well.
People would think narcolepsy or sleepwalking, but it's voluntary, I keep memories, and keep doing whatever I need to be doing.
I soon discovered you don't have to wait years; it can happen a few times a week.
Simple technique: - wait until you've woken up after a dream. (so technically hypnopompic, not hypnagogic, but more powerful imho) - Any dream will do, but be careful not to drift back into normal consciousness (so don't think of work, taxes, todo's, etc) - instead, imagine something fanciful. Like swinging at a baseball in dodger stadium in slow-motion, or, my favorite, imagining you have the worlds smallest record player between your fingers & playing a song you like (funk music is good for this) - stay with the humorous feeling, let it grow awhile - after a minute or two, you should find the dream state has stabilized - once it's stable, and only then, call up a problem or life situation you'd like insight into, or just explore the landscape (what's behind that circus tent?) - try not to get too intellectual or willful, it can dispel the state
NB: no drugs required. But caffeine in the evening can increase the odds of waking after dreaming.
your thing on smallest record players between fingers really described that feeling for me, very cool.
Your description regarding the feeling you had walking your dogs is very similar to something which happened to me once just as I was leaving work, as I was walking out of my office.
As I walked out the door, everything felt very crisp, my mind felt lighter, and it was as if my senses were working at 200%. At that time I believe I experienced that same "clarity regarding anything I examined in my mind" you described. I thought about several things and knew in that moment exactly what needed to be done in each of them, with what felt like more than absolute certainty. It only lasted a few minutes, and had left by the time I returned home.
It's never happened again. When I think back on that day, I can almost feel it, like I'm grasping at that sense of clarity, but it always remains out of reach.
Exactly!
I also was able to, just like you said, become aware of a couple of large life problems that I had been unconsciously ignoring, and felt such a serene sense of "absolute certainty" about what I wanted to do about them
If I could just have that state 3-4 times a year! It was genuinely magical
This one isn't going to work for me, I think. I can never fall asleep in chairs or anywhere except comfortably lying down. Perhaps I could try holding one arm with a ball in it off the edge of the bed.
Dreams are such a lovely experience. I love recounting them and the corresponding dream logic. I especially treasure filmmakers who can recreate that dream feeling. Fellini comes to mind.
I always shower before bed and that's when I tend to start getting sleepy. So I started meditating during that time.
I can get to the phase of seeing shifting colors and patterns very easily in this setup. I've been able to get there outside the hypnogagic state but only with some difficulty and not consistently.
If your goal is to be aware of yourself in the immediate, to feel things directly, then the hypnogagic state can work well. Obviously your mileage may vary.
And "right time" is highly debateable given the current tech at determining sleep cycles.
I don't think of it as creativity as much as sparking one's intuition. The "sleep technique" test also relies pattern recognition, which is sort of a limited creativity. You are making the final connection as opposed to opening up a whole new world of possibilities.
How much meditation time does it take to strong arm other people's work over and over again?
It's a talent, but visionary doesn't seem apt.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_nidra
Also, in case of Edison, he used an army of assistants to comb through his ideas and patents avaiable at the time to find what is useful. Again, a privilege of multimillionaire
These techniques cannot be used by a person who have to walk a dog early every morning, help his son to go to a school and work with complex code base.
I'm reasonably sure you're not saying no one is born into wealth, and I'm equally sure that all multimillionaires are born childless
It's only really useful if you can get to that stage of N1 sleep quite quickly anyway so it wouldn't apply to all people. I don't think it's the domain of childless millionaires.
Of course they can. Just not by you. Mutual exclusion does not apply here.