hypnogogia

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Hypnagogic, Dude!

That’s the catchphrase for a new character I’ll be using in a book later this year. I’m hoping it might start a trend. After all, hypnagogia’s cool!

Even if you don’t know the word, you know hypnagogia. Ever jerked awake suddenly from sleep because you were falling to your doom? Sure you have! That was a hypnagogic hallucination. Or what about being certain there’s a bee or a wasp in your room, but you can’t find it? Or having to run somewhere real fast, but you can’t move your legs? Or being abducted by aliens? Or being haunted by a twelve-inch tall goblin in a green coat and little hat that materializes up beside your bed if you accidentally let your hand or foot overhang the mattress —

Um. Actually, maybe that one’s a little more personal.

But have you ever had a uniquely similar sensation yourself, while trapped between dreaming and waking? That’s hypnagogia!

To be Hergé for a moment, hypnagogia by definition refers to the threshold consciousness you experience between sleeping and waking, a phase that might include lucid dreaming, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis. Purists will argue that hypnagogia refers specifically to the state experienced during the process of falling asleep, while hypnopompia covers the process while you’re waking up. Which is really more what I want to talk about. But quite frankly, I think “Hypnopompic, dude!” sounds stupid.

As I near the tenth anniversary of my ICU Dementia following my open heart surgery in 2005, I have distinct recollections of when the whole process got slightly more than out of hand for me. There was a good five day period when whenever I closed my eyes I couldn’t distinguish between the voices I heard and the bodies I imagined coming to probe and stick me with needles and the real voices I was hearing and the actual bodies coming to probe and stick me with needles. An experience that certainly taught me hallucinations can feel alarmingly real.

But on a regular day to day basis and night by night I am more genuinely intrigued and delighted by hypnagogia with its vividly hallucinogenic effects as an aid in the creative process. Case in point: just last week I had such a vivid dream during this period between my mind/body/subconsciousness struggle for supremacy I got the plot for a whole new novel out of it. On a theme I could never have imagined during my conscious moments in a thousand years.

It’s like a gift from some magical dimension! You are convinced by the vividness of the dreaming state combining with some body functions straining back to wakefulness that what you are imagining is completely real. Wonderful! You don’t have to write what you remember happening during these visions, you just report it. Easy, easy.

The tricky bit is that while what’s creeping to the surface from your subconscious might be utterly fascinating to you, does it make for good general storytelling? What’s your usual reaction to someone approaching you with a dopey grin on their face saying “I had this dream last night —”?

I think if told artfully, even the weirdest dreams can be made to work as good narrative, but it does require the application of the usual tools and techniques to make them so. In which case you’re not getting away with just “reporting” as I implied earlier.

But over the years I have found that I can be conscious enough of what’s going on to apply a problem in a plot I’m trying to get around to my thinking while slowly coming awake in the morning — and suddenly experience a terrific and original answer come to me as if from without that completely fixes my dilemma. And usually makes for a fair bit of satisfying storytelling. The sort of chapters that just roll out of you intact and as good as you’re going to get them, practically. No doubts about the writing at all.

Which again is the problem with the more elaborate dreams you experience in this state that you think might make a good story. The point is they weren’t stories when they were happening to you — they felt so real! As the best writing should, when it whisks you away. But for someone who wasn’t actually there experiencing the dream with you …

On the other hand, using this sort of raw material completely frees you from genre expectations. There’s no predicting what your mind might come up with in that fine state of hallucinatory half waking/half sleeping. As Jung would say, set free your collective subconscious! What’s a few irrepressible subliminal archetypes between discerning readers?

Put your psychic hangover to good work today!

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

The results are in for “Madelyn in Wonderland”. Proving once again there’s more than one way to win a Caucus Race. Judgement on Monday, The Electric Detective Chapter Five on Friday, March 6th. Reality Fiction Three: The Interrupted Edition continuing at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Was it really Carroll-Ish or more Jefferson Airplane-Ish? That depends. What was really in those teacups?

Episodes to Date:

Episode One: Dante-Ish — Mak’s Inferno

Episode Two: Chaucer-Ish — The Hermit’s Tale

Episode Three: Malory-Ish — Le Morte de Mak

Episode Four: Doyle-Ish — Mak the Kipper

Episode Five: Carroll-Ish — Madelyn in Wonderland

All with illustrations by the author. Working through the Contestants in order of their appearance.