In this ongoing series, we ask SF/F authors to describe a specialty in their lives that has nothing (or very little) to do with writing. Join us as we discover what draws authors to their various hobbies, how they fit into their daily lives, and how and they inform the author’s literary identity!
About seven years ago, I had this bizarre and beautiful thing happen to me. I was on the verge of sleep when a slideshow of images started flashing behind my closed eyes. The images weren’t things I’d ever seen before but each one was rendered in stunning detail—completely captivating—then gone onto the next. The only one I still remember was a live deer standing on a dining-room table, its antlers interlocked with the chandelier. The dining-room was as lush, quirky and detailed as a Wes Anderson set.
I wasn’t asleep but, as with dreaming, I was making no conscious effort. It was automatic. But the effort did fatigue some part of my brain. It lasted forty seconds, a few minutes?
None of my friends, including a few therapists, knew what I was talking about. One suggested that, as a prolific novelist, some part of my brain went into an inexplicable overdrive. Others just shrugged.
I shut up about it, accepting it as a small, erratic, rare gift.
This summer in a used bookstore, I found The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by neurologist Oliver Sacks. Embarrassed I’d never read it, I bought it and fell in love with it. I then picked up a bunch of his other books, including Hallucinations. The chapter “On the Threshold of Sleep” caught my eye. I flipped to it.
There, my small erratic rare gift was explained.
Hypnagogic hallucinations: “involuntary images or quasi-hallucinations appearing just before sleep.” [p. 200] The term was coined in 1848 by a French psychologist. The majority of people have them, though they might not even realize it.
Nabokov did. Some of his hallucinations were auditory in either English or Russian. And in Speak, Memory, he describes his visual ones as “…roguish profiles… some coarse-featured and florid dwarf with a swelling nostril or ear…gray figures walking between beehives, or small black parrots gradually vanishing among mountain snows…”
Poe loved his hypnagogic hallucinations so much that he’d wake himself fully to remember what he saw and use them in his work.
When I read about these two in Hallucinations, I hadn’t had a hypnagogic hallucination in a few years. I thought why should just wait passively for one to show up? I could actively set out into the dark woods of my mind and try to lure them into a moonlit clearing.
I know what you’re thinking. Baggott, just take some hallucinogens. Shroom already.
But I hate not knowing if things are real or not. I want to be in some kind of control of the slideshow. I didn’t want Baggott’s brain on drugs. I wanted to get full credit for the wild flitting hyper-detailed otherworldliness as provided by the deep recesses in my own imagination. I’d done it before. I could do it again. In fact, maybe I could even become an expert hypnagogic hunter.
Edison got his best ideas between waking and dreaming. Sitting in an armchair, ball bearings in his hands and pie-pans below, he’d stared into a fire. Once drowsy, his hands would relax and the ball bearings would fall, clattering against the pie pans, waking him up. He’d jot what he was thinking.
My plan was simpler: lie down in bed and imagine things. How hard could it be?
Reader, it was hard.
When I closed my eyes, I looked out as if through my eyelids. The room was dark except for a streetlight. I stared hard as if I could see into that fuzzily-lit darkness and drag images from it.
I couldn’t.
I looked upward, as if the inner skull of my forehead were a screen. I waited for it to fill with images.
It refused.
I hoped that my literal eyes would flip to my mind’s eye. It was all too self-conscious.
I tried to imagine the faces of various celebrities — a vague Matt Damon, a young Carol Burnett, the actress who played Olive in Little Miss Sunshine.
None of it was automatic.
Once or twice the grainy light behind my lids popped into something like driftwood or feathers—a good sign. But then it stalled.
I decided that my husband should try it too, an attempt to split the failure fifty-fifty. He was game.
I put my head on his chest and asked if he’d rub my head. A head massage would be a nice consolation prize for my failure.
As we started, I explained the bit about the eyes and he knew exactly what I meant.
“Stop talking,” he said.
We focused. I was sleepier than usual, in large part, because of the head massage. When I tried to imagine a face, Cyndi Lauper popped up—recent Lauper, not 80s Lauper.
As my husband rubbed my head, a man in a well-tailored blue suit appeared. His head was on fire. He tilted forward—jerkily—then back. Crisp and clear. His hand was in his jacket pocket, his suit had a sheen to it.
The feathers were back! The beak and eyes of a crow appeared.
Then gone, replaced by woman in a leather cap with a chin strap.
Each time my husband slowly rubbed my head, the image lifted then was replaced.
When things stalled, I asked for the man with the fiery head to appear.
He obliged—like a portal keeper—and I’d start again.
Once, I ran my leg across the sheets and bulky creatures, as if designed by a child but drawn by a master illustrator, labored across a dark sandy field.
When I stopped, I told my husband as much as I could remember. He hadn’t seen anything. Overall, it was less automatic, but still self-generating.
I try it most nights now, a hunter with a skull and flashlight and a fire-headed guide. To be honest, I’ve never gotten back to the completely automatic slideshow. It’s out there, tiptoeing through the woods. One day, I hope the hunter becomes the hunted and the images attack me again, a ferocious mauling.
Last night? Only this: a ten-year-old in a Girl Scout uniform, standing on a dark suburban street, staring into the large black mouth of an enormous sinkhole.
Julianna Baggott is the author of over twenty books including The Pure Trilogy and, most recently, The Infinity of You and Me, under J.Q. Coyle, the joint pen name she shares with author Quinn Dalton.
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this, but now I want to.
So that’s what they’re called! I often vividly hear music while I’m falling asleep – complex, unfamiliar, often beautiful music that I can direct slightly, but usually just listen to. One of the distinct sensations I frequently get when I’m jolted awake from going to sleep is a feeling of sudden silence.
I don’t often experience visual hallucinations, but then in general, my ability to picture images is much weaker than my ability to recall music. The auditory part of my brain just seems generally stronger than the visual part.
@2 That happens to me too! In fact, I hear music much more clearly when I’m at that border of sleep than when I’m fully awake. I don’t recall music all that well normally, so it’s really fun to experience my own personal concert sometimes, with multiple voices in harmony, multiple instruments, etc. I know what you mean by the feeling of silence, too. Sometimes I wish there was a way to record what my mind is constructing, because it seems awfully complex and beautiful at the time. But then I remember that it’s mostly an illusion, fragments of memory or something. There have been times where I’ve composed entire poems or even bits of novels in my dreams as well, but on the rare occasions that I manage to drag any of it into waking memory, in the light of day it’s usually either prosaic or gibberish. Since I’m rather less of a composer than I am a writer, I suspect any dream-compositions would be no better.
I do see random things as I’m falling asleep quite often, too. In fact, it’s the best way I know I’m falling asleep. I often try to relax and let my mind conjure weird things, because I often have difficulty falling asleep and it’s a distraction from more wakeful thoughts. Sort of like counting sheep but less directed. I think once or twice I did start with sheep and then they turned into other weird things sailing over the fence…
This isn’t the same thing, but once in a while I’ve had dreams that are so vivid that they seem totally real, including conversations with other people. That means I have some memories of things that never actually happened and I can’t tell the difference, which can get confusing when I interact with the people that were in those dreams. Then there are the times that I dream I’ve woken up and start going about my day, but later I wake up for real. Dreams are funny.
You are also extremely prone to suggestion while in this state.
Seems common enough, I’ve been having those for more than 10 years, and they can come easily when I’m very tired. They’ve been visual and auditive, and often feature words I had never encountered before (written or spoken. That’s where my username comes from by the way). And I love them. But I find that forcing them leads you to take control of them, and then they’re more imagination than dreams. What I love is the fact that the image comes instantly fully formed in my mind, I don’t want to touch it: it already comes from my brain, why would thinking about it make it better?
My advice: just get sleep-deprived. Or don’t, if you care about your health: hypnagogic hallucinations should just be a consolation for not being able to sleep as much as you’d want.
Philip K. Dick also used images and ideas that came to him in the hypnagogic state in his writing.
I love that you are writing about hypnogogic hallucinations! I remember learning, in high school psychology class, about these and hypnopompic (when you’re waking up, I think) hallucinations, and all my life since then I’ve paid attention to them and learned to play with and work with them. I don’t always receive them full-blast like the moment you describe, but I do always wonder, like other commenters, where the heck my mind resources the information. (Like how is it I can understand fluid Italian and have to struggle to speak it? My mind is providing both facilities.) Now that I’m in my 50s I have more trouble falling asleep, so instead I try to bring these on, since the absurdity of the images leads you right into a dream state. I actually cultivate them with little mental rituals. Last night I conjured up a horse striped like a zebra, thundering around a corner, then another corner, became the horse, always curious what was next and… woke up hours later.
And that right there is the beginning of the WILD method of Lucid Dreaming. It stands for waking into lucid dreaming, hypnagogic imagery being the introductory portal to the full on lucid dream experience. The trick is staying aware that you are falling asleep without becoming wakefully conscious in the middle of hypnagogia. I used to call them lucid starts before I knew their name. One can also experience hypnopompic imagery upon waking, and it is this imagery coupled with bodily paralysis that is often confused with sleep paralysis.
Beautiful. Its Keats negative capability in some way. So happy to see this described as positive. I have these too…won’t go on with their lovely variation but they are always very positive and beautiful.
I have automatic slideshow with music or movie scenes almost every night. Out of body illusion and feeling of real touches are rare but i like them more.
I unquestionably experience hypnopompic hallucinations, which are sort of the mirror image of hypnagogic hallucinations, with hypnopompic hallucinations occurring in the transition from sleep to wakefulness. I have not been diagnosed, but there can be no doubt this is what I experience, and quite frequently. I’ve had these hallucinations for four or five years. I may go two or three months without a hallucination, and then I often get them in bunches; perhaps three or four nights per week, and two or three times a night. My early hallucinations primarily assumed the form of shapes and shadows that I perceived. However, the last few years they mainly involve people; sometimes multiple people at once. I don’t experience any auditory hallucinations associated with the visual hallucinations, for which I’m grateful, because the visual hallucinations are disturbing enough. Sometimes the people are stationary, and other times they move. The creepiest ones are those in which the person or multiple people turn their heads to look at me. I realize when I’m having these hallucinations that they are not real, yet I feel like I’m awake and the vividness of the hallucination is so potent that I can’t help but have a bit of doubt when I experience these events. Over the last year or so I’ve started to “interact” with the hallucinations, in the sense that to make them disappear I will get out of bed and approach them. Sometimes if I’m in a stretch of frequent nights of hallucinations I get frustrated and will actually get aggressive and take a swing at the hallucinatory person or give them a push, which generally has the effect of making them disappear, as occurs when I simply get closer to them. Of course, I’m simply punching or pushing air, because there is no tactile element to these hallucination. On occasion, they will simply just move away from me, sometimes behind furniture or behind a lamp which prevents me from getting more than a couple of feet from them. After I engage them I typically go to the bathroom to either – well – go to the bathroom or to grab a drink of water and wake up completely. Invariably the hallucination(s) is/are gone after I take this step, because I’m then fully awake. I will point out that I do not have a mental illness or psychiatric problem, I do not do drugs, and I do not have narcolepsy. I will note, though, that my father died of Alzheimer’s. I do not have any signs of Alzheimer’s myself. I sleep quite well and usually get at least eight hours of sleep, even with these disturbances. This is one of the benefits of being retired. From everything I have read, there is nothing compelling about my condition to make me want to visit a doctor, but when I’m in one of my three/four nights per week runs of hallucinations, I’m tempted to make an appointment, only to reconsider when I wake up the following morning.