Hypnagogia
When are you in your most creative state? Sitting at your desk? Taking a walk? In the shower? Or in that half-awake, half-asleep state of mind as you wake up in the morning or fall asleep at night?
Turns out there are words for those last two. Hypnagogia is the moments before falling asleep and hypnopompia as you wake up.
Decades ago, before smartphones, I used to keep a small pad of paper and pen next to my bed to write down the thoughts that came in the moments of hypnagogia. Often writing them down in the dark, without turning on the lights, in an effort to get the thoughts “out of my head” so I could fall asleep. These days I just email them to myself from my phone.
Is there a word for when this happens in the middle of the night? A few months back I woke up at 3am, with a fresh business idea in my head, so excited I had to get up, grab my computer, and write the plan then and there. Took me two hours, getting me back to bed before the sunrise.
Has that ever happened to you?
Hypnagogia and hypnopompia (entrance and exist)
Geoffrey Okoth Yoga.
The physicist, Albert Einstein, is considered one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Did you ever know that his big breakthrough Theory of Relativity came to him in a dream ?
A kind of hypnagogia or hypnopompia Luni is talking about.
He discovered the theory of relativity which says that matter can be changed to energy and energy into matter. Which led to the making of atomic bomb that was used to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In her book, “Wake Up to Your Dream” Sandra Collier discussed how dreaming affected Albert Einstein.
Hear Einstein himself tell his dream.
“I was sledding with my friends at night. I started to slide down the hill but my sled started going faster and faster. I was going so fast that I realized I was approaching the speed of light. I looked up at that point and I saw the stars. They were being refracted into colors I had never seen before. I was filled with a sense of awe. I understood in some way that I was looking at the most important meaning in my life.”
Years later, Einstein said, “I knew I had to understand that dream and you could say, and I would say, that my entire scientific career has been a meditation on my dream.”
Einstein realized that secrets had been revealed to him in the dream but he needed to understand what they meant. His dream helped him realize what lay before him. It laid the foundation for the greatest scientific advancement the world had ever known.
Even the sewing machine owes its invention to a dream.
Elias Howe worked as a sewing operator and wanted to find a way to make his work easier. One night he dreamt that a savage king ordered him to invent a sewing machine.
After trying unsuccessfully, the tribe threatened to kill him with spears.
Just before they attempted to spear him, he noticed that each spear had a hole in it just above the point. This was the clue he needed to make the sewing machine a reality.
Elias’s dream helped him solve a big problem he had and gave birth to the sewing machine.
Physicist Niels Bohr was trying to understand the nature of the atom. He tried several times to figure out the nature of the atom and how it was constructed. This problem perplexed him for a long time.
Finally, one night he had a dream. This dream consisted of the sun composed of burning gases with planets orbiting around it attached by fine threads. When he woke up, he realized that this was the solution to his problem.
He realized from his dream the structure of the atom, which heralded the birth of atomic physics. Bohr went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physics (the ultimate honor that any scientist can ever receive.) Bohr's son Aage also became a physicist and shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1975.
Dmitry Mendeleyev, a brilliant 19th century chemist and physicist. He recreated the Periodic Table during his waking hours after it appeared to him in its entirety in a dream.
Dr. Jonas Salk. For years he treated people with polio. However, he was not successful due to lack of a vaccine to fight it. One night he had a dream that gave him the ingredients to make the vaccine. Because of that dream, he went on to invent the polio vaccine.
You may not be a scientist but every day you are facing challenges in some aspect of your life, and may find the answer through your dreams.
A few days before he was killed, the famous American president, Abraham Lincoln, said that he was impressed by the number of prophetic dreams in the Bible.
When his wife asked him why he’d brought this up, Lincoln related a dream he just had.
He was wandering through the halls of the White House trying to find out where the sound of weeping people was coming from. His search led him to the East Room where he saw a coffin lying on a platform, guarded by soldiers and surrounded by a throng of mourners.
“Who died?” he asked.
“The president. Killed by an assassin,” was the answer.
The sound of loud grieving sobs of mourners forced Abraham Lincoln to awaken from his dream.
Unfortunately for Lincoln, his dream proved real and it happened that a few days later he was assassinated.
https://www.history.com/articles/did-abraham-lincoln-predict-his-own-death.
It was a dream that Abraham had that foretold his people’s slavery in Egypt and their eventual Exodus. “After a while the sun was about to set, and a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and, look! A frightfully great darkness was falling upon him. And he began to say to Abram: ‘You may know for sure that your seed will become an alien resident in a land not theirs, and they will have to serve them, and these will certainly afflict them for four hundred years. But the nation that they will serve I am judging, and after that they will go out with many goods.”(Genesis 15:12-14).
Hypnagogia is the moments before falling asleep as Luni has said and hypnopompia is the moment as you wake up.
We are spirit living in human body.
As we go to sleep our spirit leaves the body to explore the universe. The spirit gathers all sort of information and brings to the body in the morning.
This is the reason people cherish morning activities because. Because the person is still full of fresh information delivered to them by the spirit for that day.
So Hypnagogia or hypnopompia are the points the spirit leaves and enters the body. It is a kind of transition from dreaming life to real life.
Hey Luni, How did that plan look when you were fully awake in daylight mode? I've had some good thoughts come as you have described but the whole tamale was a little weird.