

In Pursuit of Sleep

The Origins of Insomnia and What to Do About It

by

David Sheppard

Tragedy's Workshop

Cloverdale, CA
Also by David Sheppard

Story Alchemy: The Quest for the Philosopher's Stone of Storytelling

Novelsmithing: The Structural Foundation of Plot, Character and Narration

Oedipus on a Pale Horse: Journey Through Greece in Search of a Personal Mythology

Introduction to Frankenstein: Origins and Aftermath

The Eternal Return: Oedipus, The Tempest, Forbidden Planet

The Escape of Bobby Ray Hammer: A Novel of a 50s Family

The Mysteries: A Novel of Ancient Eleusis

Carpathian Vampire: When You've Never Known Love (as Lumi Laura)
Copyright 2016 David Sheppard

Published by David Sheppard

ISBN-13: 978-0-9910028-5-6

ISBN-10: 0-9910028-5-7

Cover, Illustrations and Design   
by Richard Sheppard, www.artstudios.com

Publisher Web site: www.TragedysWorkshop.com

Author Web site: www.DShep.com

Book Web site: www.InPursuitOfSleep.com
Contents

Author's Note

Chapter 1: The Sleep Problem

Chapter 2: Hypnagogia and Sleep Onset

Chapter 3: Sleep Preparation

Chapter 4: Charging the Gates of Slumberland

Chapter 5: Controlling Your Psychic Voice

Chapter 6: Chasing Hypnos

Chapter 7: Hypnopompia

Chapter 8: When Sleep Means Death

Chapter 9: Agony of Choice

Chapter 10: Afterward

Bibliography

About the Author
Author's Note

This book is an outgrowth of sixty-five years of experimentation and research. I have had difficulty sleeping since I was a child. At the age of eight, I had an imaginary girlfriend — the flying girl on the cover reminds me of her — who went on adventures with me while I waited for sleep. My father was a farmer and prone to worry over product prices and the weather, things he could do nothing about. I absorbed a certain amount of his insomnia and worry, and passed it along to my kids. This same story with different characters plays out every night throughout the world, and by all reports is getting worse because of the accelerating pace, complexity and dangers of modern life. This book is my attempt at turning the tide.

If you have difficulty sleeping, the first thing I want to get across is that nothing is wrong with you. Your brain does not have a defect. The problem is that when you were born, you didn't come with a user's manual, and you didn't get the chapter you should have gotten on how your mind works. It would have had a special section on sleep. In all probability, you don't need medication. What you do need is a little help controlling the way your mind functions while negotiating that gray zone between being awake and being asleep. If you have been lying awake at night waiting helplessly for sleep to come, it is time you went on the offensive.

This book is about pursuing sleep. It presents all the information you need to chase sleep all the way to Slumberland. It is not about tricking yourself into going to sleep. The method is based on scientific principles and decades of research. It builds off of what we know about the way the mind works. It does not involve medication. And it doesn't take weeks of learning before you can get started. You don't have to change your lifestyle. Read this today, use the method tonight.

I am an author and an engineer with an MS from Stanford University. I have written nine books, both fiction and non-fiction, two of them on the creative process and the inner-workings of the mind close to the sleep state. I have experimented with dreams and lucid dreaming and how to use them creatively. I have developed a method for dealing with insomnia, and it isn't something you'll find in the literature or an Internet search, and it doesn't involve meditation. It is completely new. Will it work for you? Chances are excellent that it will.

If you have a job or little ones to care for, you need good sound sleep. Sleep interruptions can occur at any time during the night. Your child can wake you. You might have to go to the bathroom. Your sleeping partner can wake you for any number of reasons. How do you get back to sleep under these circumstances? This method will help you get the sleep you so badly need to get you through the day.

I have only taken four types of medication to get to sleep, three self-medicated and one under prescription from a doctor. The first I tried was melatonin, which is a hormone involved in circadian rhythms. It had no effect. Neither did valerian root, an herb that is supposed to cause drowsiness. For a couple of years I took Benadryl, three capsules at bedtime and two the first time I woke, about four or five hours later. Benadryl helped some, but I didn't like taking so much since it does have side effects.

For six months while teaching astronomy at New Mexico State University - Carlsbad, I took Ambien, which worked well enough but didn't seem to give me the kind of sleep I needed. When I went off it, I had scintillating scotoma every day for a couple of weeks. I had large flickering blotches in my field of vision and blank spots where I could see nothing. For six months after quitting, I also had more difficulty getting to sleep than before I took Ambien.

I started researching solutions for insomnia seriously in December 1990. I had been using all the "tricks," like counting sheep and trying to hold my eyelids open. I investigated cognitive behavior therapy, sleep hygiene, and tried meditation to clear my mind of thoughts. None of it had a measurable impact. I was an engineer working on NASA missions to the outer planets and US Air Force projects. I was also an author writing novels and accumulating material on the creative process. I became interested in the periods just before and after sleep because they seemed to be inordinately useful for many authors as well as other creative people. I developed a method of taking my characters into my dreams, and I developed work strategies and solutions for difficult engineering tasks just before I went to sleep and when I woke. Sixteen years ago, I started exploring the scientific literature on the period of time just before sleep and eventually discovered a complete world of information under the title "hypnagogia." I then developed a method to solve my insomnia problem.

I am a professional but not a sleep professional, and apparently that is a good thing. Little or no rigorous research has been accomplished on techniques to direct the mind to enter sleep. Sleep research has been predominantly performed, or at least paid for, by pharmaceutical companies interested in developing medication to make the subject unconscious. I wouldn't doubt but what there is a conscious effort on the part of pharmaceutical companies to steer research away from thought-directed methods of getting to sleep in favor of researching drugs to get us into a state that simulates sleep. These drugs usurp the natural processes involved and do not achieve the same result as the patient actually being asleep. If the general public found out that it is possible to cure severe, long-time insomnia with a simple thought-directed procedure, it could put them out of business. However, I do not recommend that you quit taking any medication that a healthcare professional has prescribed for you.

We do have extensive psychotherapy procedures to resolve issues that flood into consciousness and co-opt the process of going to sleep, but these deep-seated emotional problems are not even necessarily the problem. Therapy can take years and have mixed results. It also can make matters worse. An online search will reveal many methods for producing an environment conducive to sleep and even some superficial methods of tricking your mind into going to sleep. My guess is that none of them work reliably for you, or you wouldn't be reading this.

The other reason that provided the impetus for writing this book is that I went through five years of psychotherapy. At the time, I was having all sorts of problems, from troublesome relationships to panic attacks. At times, I had a fear of dying in my sleep. Although therapy was helpful in many ways and my psychiatrist was very good, I also came to realize its limitations. I walked away with many of the problems I came to it with, and getting to sleep was one of them. I even came away with a problem or two I didn't have when I entered therapy. As my psychiatrist told me, every treatment has it side effects, even therapeutic treatment. Therapy helped me realize that the medical profession did not yet have a solution to insomnia, and that I would have to solve my problem myself.

What I present here appears to be the first serious research into methods to direct the mind along a path into sleep. My most fervent wish is that this book will prod sleep professionals to start research into directing the mind toward sleep. Perhaps then we, as the world of the sleep-deprived, can actually do something about our insomnia without being drugged.

Will this be the answer for everyone? Some people have more serious problems with sleep than the ones I provide a solution for here. They have brain damage, chemical imbalances, and/or chronic pain. They will have to rely on professional medical help. However, I contend that most people, even while suffering all the stresses of modern life and regardless of age, should still be able to get to sleep in less than five minutes. That certainly has been my experience. And it does not take a six-week program and hundreds of dollars to get you there. But even if you do need medication or have chronic pain, this method should be of benefit.

After a year or so of practicing this technique, which I call the Transition Trek, I just let my mind freewheel to remind me how I used to try to get to sleep. Took me about an hour to "fall" asleep, when now I can get to sleep easily in less than a minute. Waiting for sleep is such a messy and ineffective way to get where you are going. It is like standing on a corner waiting for a bus when you don't know the bus schedule or even if a bus comes down that street. You don't "fall" asleep. Gravity is not the sleep solution. Sleep doesn't come get you either. Sleep is waiting on you to come for it. I am going to show you how to go get it.

You don't have to change your life to get to sleep quickly. What you do have to change is the way your mind functions during the five minutes it takes to traverse the transitional state from being awake to being asleep. Read this book today, use the method tonight.
In Pursuit of Sleep
1

The Sleep Problem

You have tried closing your eyes and letting sleep come to you, but waiting for sleep for some is like waiting for Godot, and when that pale light in the East starts to brighten, you realize the Sandman isn't coming, and you are in for another groggy day. Perhaps sleep had reliably come to you for decades, but now something has changed and not for the better. You started mindfulness meditation, and you have developed and maintained good sleep hygiene. You now make a "letting-go list" and practice the 4-7-8 breathing exercise before you attempt to go to sleep. You bought a cellphone app, maybe two or three. Even some heart monitoring electronic equipment. You keep a sleep journal. All this even helped a little, and yet, didn't actually get to the core of the problem. You have tried cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and rather desperately tried "counting sheep" in the hopes that the old banality had some scientific basis. Nothing really solved your insomnia. The problem is that you are still waiting for sleep to come to you, and you need a more proactive approach.

Circadian Rhythms and Sleep Propensity

Circadian Rhythms are human biological clocks that predispose us for activities at certain times each day and are primarily configured by sunlight. Sleep is one of these activities. We sleep approximately one-third of each day, and our circadian rhythms are set to provide that sleep propensity at night. See the "normal" propensity curve in Figure 1-1. The other thing is that when we first awake in the morning, our sleep propensity is in continual decline, with the exception of a small hump during siesta time in the afternoon. It starts to build in the evening, and by late evening, it should be irresistible. If you can't get to sleep when you first go to bed, the problem is termed "sleep onset insomnia." When you wake during the night and cannot get back to sleep, the problem is termed "sleep maintenance insomnia."

Figure 1-1 Sleep Propensity/Circadian Rhythms — Normal (Data from "Important Underemphasized Aspects of Sleep Onset," by Roger Broughton from Sleep Onset ed. by Ogilvie and Harsh.)

Older people tend to go to sleep earlier in the evening and rise earlier. They generally get less sleep although their need for sleep is the same as the rest of us; therefore, they may have an even greater need for a reliable method of getting to sleep and remaining there.

Figure 1-2 Sleep Propensity/Circadian Rhythms — Problematic

The sleep propensity profile of Figure 1-1 is the primary background influence for all of our sleep activity. It provides the impetus to sleep. At this point, you cannot even come close to understanding how important this circadian rhythm/sleep propensity chart is. But the "normal" curve in this chart is for "normal" people. If you're having trouble sleeping, this is not you. Your sleep propensity curve probably looks like the "problematic" one of Figure 1-2 where the propensity to sleep is highest in the afternoon and only moderate at normal sleep times. This is a hypothetical estimation of your sleep problem, but it doesn't tell you how you got so messed up to begin with or what to do about it. Can it even be fixed? Or is that just you? Born that way, and the problem destined to be with you forever.

What History Tells Us About Sleep Propensity

While the normal sleep propensity curve of Figure 1-1 gives us a good idea of our sleep habits today, in the not too distant past this was far from the case. Before the Industrial Revolution and the invention of electricity and electrical lights, our nocturnal habits were quite different. Historical research has revealed that we predominately used to sleep in two four-hour segments, separated by an hour or two-hour stretch of activity. The first segment was termed "dead sleep" and the second "morning sleep," and this segmented sleep was not seen as abnormal. According to researcher A. Roger Ekirch:

"...the vast weight of surviving evidence indicates that awakening naturally was routine, not the consequence of disturbed or fitful slumber." [Ekirch, A. Roger (2006-10-17). At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (p. 302). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.]

This means that for many people, their propensity curve had been reshaped to fit that sleep pattern, i.e., they had a low propensity to sleep in the middle of the night. Ekirch also says that:

There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind. (p. 303)

However natural the segmented sleep pattern might be, one thing is certain: sleep propensity is malleable. To a large extent, it can even be reset to the inverse of the Figure 1-1 normal curve when a worker goes on the nightshift. Even the one-hour shift that occurs as a result of daylight saving time presents problems. Of course, with our highly mobile society, travelers going through several time zones end up with what we call jet lag. It can take several days for the traveler to adjust the sleep propensity curve to a new location several time zones from home, but they do adjust. Anything that repeatedly disrupts your sleep at the same time during the night can alter the curve and not always in your favor.

Regardless of the reason, waking and staying awake during the night can negatively influence sleep propensity and predispose you to have problems at those same time periods the next night and strengthen the problem thereafter. I have experienced a predilection for waking at certain times because of repeated interruptions. Getting back to sleep quickly can help heal these "holes" in your propensity curve and provide you with a better night's sleep.

The Key to a Solution

You have undoubtedly searched the Internet for methods of falling asleep, but the suggestions you found did not even address what actually goes on inside the mind while falling asleep. So-called experts talked about deep sleep and rapid eye movement (REM), which occurs while dreaming and a long time after you have gone to sleep. They addressed the physiological aspects, encouraging you to practice calming techniques and to ensure an environment conducive to sleep. But they didn't address the road into Slumberland directly and expect you to close your eyes and wait until you "fall" asleep. They talked around the problem. All the questions remain: What do we know about going to sleep? Where does sleep reside? How do we get there? What has gone wrong?

You realize that some thoughts, what we might call the psychic voice, keep you from going to sleep, and you've tried to not think those thoughts, but the problem is that your mind has to think about something, and generally it is hot-button issues. If you quit one troublesome thought, something else comes to mind, and it is not conducive to sleep either. You need something for your mind to do that actually assists the going-to-sleep process. No one even addresses the need for this, much less supplies it. Oh yeah, "Count sheep."

If you shouldn't be waiting for sleep, how do you go get it? How do you hunt it down? To start this safari, we need to understand the wake-sleep transitional state. And interestingly enough, we know quite a lot, but that information hasn't been directed toward getting to sleep. We generally think of our primary mental state as thoughts, which come from the psychic voice. What a thought is, on an objective basis, scientists are not quite sure, but we experience them continuously. What we don't realize is that we cannot think without visualization. Aristotle was the first to recognize this. As he put it, "Without an image, thinking is impossible." [On Memory, Ref 450a1] Images occur before thoughts. One might say that thoughts are built on images. Just as computers work most basically with zeroes and ones, the mind works with images.

We don't see all the psyche's activity and are probably clued into only a small portion of all that is going on. Some images do come to the surface, and the popular term for where these images appear is the "mind's eye." The mind's eye is much more important than you might think, and it has nothing to do with eyeballs and everything to do with falling asleep. The mind is an image-processing machine. Archetypal psychology, an offshoot of Jungian psychology, is based on this fact. Here is the way archetypal psychologists view the images that appear in the mind's eye:

The source of images – dream images, fantasy images, poetic images – is the self-generative activity of the soul itself. In archetypal psychology, the word "image" therefore does not refer to an afterimage, the result of sensations and perceptions; nor does "image" mean a mental construct that represents in symbolic form certain ideas and feelings it expresses. In fact, the image has no referent beyond itself, neither proprioceptive, external, nor semantic: "Images don't stand for anything". They are the psyche itself in its imaginative visibility; as primary datum, image is irreducible. Hillman, James (2013-10-18). Archetypal Psychology (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Book 1) (Kindle Locations 118-122). Spring Publications. Kindle Edition.]

Exactly how mental images, those that do not involve the eye, are formed is not fully understood either, but one thing we all know is that dreams are built with images. In dreams, we see, and this is the key we'll use to unlock the sleep problem. To sleep, we need a bridge from the World of Thoughts to the World of Images.

The method of getting to sleep presented in Chapter 4 can go a long ways toward helping you repair your sleep propensity curve. Sleep professionals will tell you to go to bed at the same time every night, and this is certainly good advice. But if you don't go to sleep right away, it won't repair your sleep propensity curve. The only way to repair it is to get to sleep at the appropriate time and stay there, night after night after night. Sleep, deep sleep, at the proper time is the only thing that repairs it.

In Chapter 2, we will unlock the most closely held secret mechanisms of the mind while it is trying to go to sleep, and in Chapters 3 and 4, we will direct those mechanisms toward producing sleep instead of wallowing in non-productive thought processes. Sleep is more complex than you ever thought, and getting to sleep once you understand what is going on is much easier than you can imagine.
2

Hypnagogia and Sleep Onset

We ordinarily think of ourselves as either being awake or asleep, our minds being either on or off. We include dreaming as a part of the sleep state. But the situation is actually more complex, and to get at the heart of the sleep problem, we need to take a closer look.

There are actually four states we need to deal with. Dreaming needs to be defined as a separate state and is referred to as REM, which stands for rapid eye movement because the eyes move rapidly from side to side while we dream. The other two states are transitions. Hypnagogia is the term used for transitioning from being awake to being asleep. Hypnopompia is the term used for transitioning from REM to being awake. Figure 2-1 is a representation of what happens during a normal night's sleep. We all experience these states every night, although we might not have spent much time considering them. The mind also goes through several levels, termed stages, of deepening sleep during what we think of as our normal eight-hour sleep period. Scientists discovered these stages by recording brain electrical activity using an electroencephalogram (EEG).

As you can see in Figure 2-1, in addition to stages, sleep also occurs in cycles. For eight hours sleep, this generally means five ninety-minute cycles, the last three somewhat shallower and longer. Each cycle consists of as many as four stages during which the mind "descends" into the depths of unconsciousness. When the mind ascends to near consciousness, we enter REM and dream. The length of time we spend in REM increases with each cycle. During each of the five periods of REM, we come close to being awake, and some of us may actually become fully awake and have difficulty getting back to sleep.

Figure 2-1 The Stages and Cycles of Sleep

One problem that can wake you out of REM is dry eyes. Some people have this problem every night. Remember that REM means rapid eye movement. If you have dry eyes, this eye movement can be painful, and it will wake you every time you enter REM. If you don't do something about it immediately, you can't get back to sleep either. Not only can it contribute to insomnia, it radically reduces the time you spend in REM and can adversely affect your physical and mental health. For those with this problem, I recommend having some form of eye drops, perhaps even an eye lubricant, on the night stand for handy access. I haven't been able to find this connection between REM, dry eyes and insomnia in any book or article on sleep, or anywhere on the Internet. I have the problem. So could you. Medication can also potentially cause dry eyes, so be careful what you take. You may be worsening your insomnia.

Sleep propensity diminishes as we sleep, so we naturally have less as the night goes on. If we wake at the end of a sleep cycle our sleep propensity is less than when we first got into bed, and we may have more difficulty getting back to sleep. Couple this with the fact that some of us have impaired sleep propensity curves because of repeated interruptions at a specific time, and you can have a rather severe problem.

The dashed lines at the top of each cycle indicate that, if we do wake, we transition through hypnopompia as we do so and then also transition through hypnagogia as we return to sleep. Ordinarily, we should go through hypnagogia and hypnopompia only once each, hypnagogia in the evening and hypnopompia in the morning. That also means that during the night, and including the first time we go to sleep, we have five chances to mess up getting the rest we need to function efficiently the next day. The procedure we will use to get back to sleep may be needed five times each night. At the end of the fifth sleep cycle we do wake, our night is over, and it is time to get out of bed and get ready for the new day. First, we will concentrate on the first time we descend into sleep, although our return-to-sleep routine will be the same for each cycle, if needed.

Figure 2-2 EEG Waveforms for Each Sleep Stage

An example of EEG waveforms that occur during each stage of sleep is shown in Figure 2-2. These waveforms, which can be quite different, are provided just to let you know how sleep scientists define each stage. The waveforms are interesting but don't point toward a solution for insomnia.

Hypnagogia generally lasts only five minutes. Most of us experience hypnagogia as our wandering thoughts as we wait to fall asleep. We may have flashes of images or hear voices that are of no consequence and dismiss them. When we can not fall asleep, we start imagining conversations that become arguments, or we engage in endless fantasies or even try to solve a problem. This is where the trouble getting to sleep starts, and it can seem to go on for an eternity. If we wake during or after each cycle's REM, we again have to go through hypnagogia to get back to sleep.

What is hypnagogia and its relationship to the onset of sleep? Hypnagogia is a pre-sleep state and really not sleep at all, nor is it an awake state. The intellect is still active, although portions of hypnagogia exhibit characteristics of REM and deep sleep states. Hypnagogia is the internal or psychic experience of falling asleep, the psychic road we travel down to get to sleep. Hypnagogia is in itself extraordinarily complex with all sorts of psychic activity. The psychic occurrences (visions, voices, sounds and other physical senses) that occur during this period are termed "hypnagogic experiences." The scientific community does not talk much about hypnagogia and mainly concentrates on measurable data taken by instrumentation on the subject's scalp (EEG) and chemical changes in the brain while the subject goes to sleep. Scientists term this period "sleep onset." (Hypnopompia, the transitional state between REM and being awake, will be dealt with in Chapter 6.)

You have probably never heard of hypnagogia even though we have known about it for over two thousand years. Aristotle wrote about it. Human beings have probably known about it for thousands of years before that, although not by that name. Dr. Andreas Mavromatis, who wrote the book (listed in the Bibliography) on hypnagogia, defines hypnagogic experiences as, "hallucinatory and quasi-hallucinatory events taking place in the intermediate state between wakefulness and sleep." [page 3] If you would like to read about it as it shows up in literature, see the book by Peter Schwenger, At the Boarders of Sleep, also listed in the Bibliography. It is truly eyeopening. As we go along, we'll investigate hypnagogia and how its characteristics might provide clues to help us get to sleep.

Sleep professionals want you to create a good environment and physical state before you go to bed to help you get to sleep. This is called "sleep hygiene" and is good as far as it goes, but when you close your eyes, you are on your own. Plus, of course, they want you to take a pill because that is where they make their money. You can also wake up groggy the next day, and the long-term effects of the medications they prescribe can be moderate to severe and sometimes not known at all. The good news is that controlling your sleep-onset and sleep-maintenance mental processes is quite easy under normal circumstances, and hypnagogia is readily influenced.

Some people find going to sleep initially easy enough only to wake completely after first REM, and subsequently, and are not able to negotiate hypnagogia successfully to enter the next sleep cycle. Plus medications are for sleep onset insomnia and not sleep maintenance insomnia, which occurs after REM. Hypnagogia has its seductive distractions that lead you astray. Nowhere is that fact more emphatically stated than in an article by Mircea Steriade titled, "Sleep Oscillations and PGO Waves" (2009), where Steriade states that during the preparatory state we "...display complex motor behaviors directed to find a safe home for sleep." This search for a safe harbor indicates that the passageway to sleep is replete with obstacles that we should avoid.

This makes it imperative that we learn as much as possible about hypnagogia, so we can solve the problem each time we encounter it. The strange thing is that, although hypnagogia has been studied, it is rarely, if ever, addressed when discussing insomnia. Yes, you read that right. When professionals deal with the problems of getting to sleep, they rarely if ever discuss the nature of the transition state and how to deal with it.

...we know neither why nor how we fall asleep. The study of sleep has for the most part focused on measures obtained during established sleep, and many of the events and phenomena of sleep onset have been ignored. [Sleep Onset, Normal and Abnormal Processes, edited by Robert D. Ogilvie, PHD and John R. Harsh, PhD, Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994, page xviii]

Again, researchers are focused on the physics and chemistry of brain function during sleep because they are developing medication to put you in that state, and they specifically exclude the subjective personal experience of sleep onset, hypnagogia. So that is where we will start, with the initial mental processes involved in going to sleep.

Hypnagogia is really interesting. So is the method for getting yourself through it and to sleep quickly when you ordinarily would have stayed awake for hours. But before we get to the solution, you must understand hypnagogia. It has its uses but also a multitude of distractions that can lead you down the wrong path. In other words, hypnagogia is not just a steep slope you slide down to "fall" asleep. Indeed, it is more like a battlefield, a psychiatrist's couch, a mad scientist's laboratory, a movie theater, and the oracle at Delphi all rolled into one. Insomniacs generally experience it as the mind racing as it tries to solve a problem, engages in an imaginary argument or some out-of-control fantasy. The mind will just not stay quiet and "fall" asleep. Efforts to quieten our thoughts work for a bit but ultimately fail. And the problem is the very nature of hypnagogia.

Dr. Daniel L. Schacter provides a description of some of hypnagogia's more spectacular characteristics in a 1976 article titled, "The Hypnagogic State: A Critical Review of the Literature." He says that hypnagogia is a state of reverie characterized by:

...spontaneously appearing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic images; qualitatively unusual thought processes and verbal constructions... Additionally, specific physiological indexes have been observed in conjunction with these phenomena: A slowing of frequency and depression of amplitude of the electroencephalogram (EEC) and the appearance of slow eye movements... and recent studies suggest that... changes in respiratory patterns may accompany the above psychological phenomena.

Hypnagogic images are consistently more real than dream images and even our view of the real world. One subject relates that, "The faces I see are more vivid than nature . . . absolutely full of life and movement . . . always possess vividness of expression." [Schacter, page 461] The images associated with hypnagogia can take many forms, including geometric symbols, faces, or landscapes. Most anything, actually. And as Dr. Schacter says, it is not just images. Sounds and physiological phenomena also occur.

If these hypnagogic experiences are so profound, why isn't everyone talking about them? The answer to this frequently asked question is that the more spectacular phenomena can require a certain "power of observation" to notice them. In other words, some of us have to be actively looking and listening to observe them, yet even if not noticed, they are still there and cause problems trying to get to sleep. Some find them easier to locate than do others. I wasn't aware of any hypnagogic occurrences until I started practicing Jung's active imagination (defined later). I then realized I had experienced them many times through the years and started seeing and hearing all sorts of visions and voices just before sleep. Even though we might not be aware of hypnogogic events, they are the background cauldrons of emotional activity that pull us off the beaten path to sleep.

The intellect is still functional during this time and can be directed to monitor the psychic phenomena associated with hypnagogia. In those who do actually descend fully into sleep, the intellect succumbs to drowsiness and slips through hypnagogia quickly, perhaps not even noticing anything unusual. If you slow down the process and take notice, you quickly learn that a lot more is going on inside your own mind than you would have ever thought. And what you have unconsciously done has produced your insomnia. You have slowed hypnagogia and made use of some of its remarkable characteristics that are helpful in certain situations but certainly not when you want to get to sleep.

The complexity of the hypnagogic state has been demonstrated scientifically:

"Detailed EEG analyses of wakefulness–sleep transition (WST) revealed a quite complex picture consisting of nine stages with different electro-physiological features. Almost all of the nine stages could be accompanied by hypnagogic experiences..." [Elsevier, Brain Research Bulletin 76 (2008) 85–89, "Wakefulness–sleep transition: Emerging electroencephalographic similarities with the rapid eye movement phase," Robert Bodizs, Melinda Sverteczki, Eszter Meszaros]

The nine different waveforms obtained during this research are shown in Figure 2-3. We won't go into the technical description of these nine waveforms; however, the subjective hypnagogic experiences described by individuals will give us some clues to the nature of the mental processes during these wave states.

Figure 2-3 Hypnagogia 9 Stages Waveforms (Ogilvie and Harsh, Page 241) EEG Recordings Illustrating Nine EEG Stages and Correspondence to Standard Sleep Stages

Foulkes and Vogel conducted one of the foundational studies on hypnagogia in 1965:

It was found that mental activity in some form or another was invariably reported throughout the hypnagogic period. Content reported was predominantly visual and lacking in affective intensity and it became increasingly hallucinatory and unamenable to voluntary control... ["Mental activity at sleep onset," by Foulkes, David; Vogel, Gerald; in: Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol 70(4), Aug 1965, 231-243.]

So initially, we do have a measure of control over what we experience during hypnagogia but lose much of it the closer we get to sleep. As a follow-on to this, a study by Hori, Hayashi, and Morikawa found that:

The visual imagery increased gradually from Stage 1 to Stage 6 and remained high in the other stages. Percentages of auditory and bodily imagery were less than 15% and showed steady decline from Stage 1 to Stage 6. ["Topographical EEG Changes and the Hypnagogic Experience," by Tadao Hori, Mitsuo Hayashi, and Toshio Morikawa; in Ogilvie and Harsh, 1994]

More specifically, in this study, from hypnagogia Stage 1 to Stage 9 (being awake to being asleep), visual images comprised as much as 91 percent (increasing toward sleep) of the hypnagogic experiences; auditory experiences constituted as much as 12 percent (decreasing toward sleep), and as much as 13 percent for the other senses. All the senses could be present: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. From this we see that sight (images) was by far the most prevalent hypnagogic experience with sound (auditory) coming in a distant second.

What should you take away from all this research data? Three things: First, we have control of hypnagogia initially but lose more and more control the closer we get to sleep. Second, to control hypnagogia we need to concentrate primarily on visual experiences but also sounds with the other senses playing a diminishing role. Finally, since all five psychic senses show up in hypnagogia, we essentially are dealing with what we might call our psychic body. What we need to do with this psychic body is to find a way of controlling and directing it away from the distractions of hypnagogia, primarily through the use of images. This is an important conclusion, and we will definitely use it as a part of our solution.

Even if what we have uncovered about hypnagogia so far can lead us toward a solution, we still have not learned why it is such a problem. The question is: Why should the processes of sleep onset be so detrimental to getting to sleep? That seems contradictory. Here is the reason: Hypnagogia is inspirational.

The hypnagogic state has been used for hundreds and possibly thousands of years by our most brilliant minds: artists, scientific professionals, inventors and psychics, and their experiences shed light on what is so distracting about this pre-sleep state that diverts our attention away from going to sleep. As a matter of fact, hypnagogia is what puts the genius in geniuses. However, these distracting influences aren't peculiar to geniuses. Everyone is subject to the same influences.

Here are the predominant activities that are intensified during hypnagogia. Keep in mind that some activities are immediately available and others are more remote and difficult to get to. Still, hypnagogia can capture your thought processes and use them to its own advantage if you are lying around waiting for sleep to come to you. With each of these processes come images, sounds (sometimes voices), and triggers for the other three senses as well. Your thoughts provide a background for augmenting the hypnagogic processes.

Problem-Solving Hypnagogia

One of the more important aspects of hypnagogia is that it is a great problem-solving state, and because of this, your brain can latch onto a problem from your daily life and delve into finding a solution while trying to negotiate hypnagogia. It can be solving a math problem, a financial difficulty, or working out a new floor plan for a home. Of course, you have gone to bed to sleep, not solve problems. Hypnagogia has hijacked the brain's normal processes and led it astray. Your thought processes have become the enemy. And it is not the bad side of you — that complacent, lazy person who ignores problems. It is your better angels, the conscientious part that is always trying to solve problems. Shutting this off can be difficult if you don't know how. You have gone to bed to get some much-needed sleep but can't shut off the internal dialogue. Your mind races with what seems important thoughts, but then you realize that nothing is more important than getting a few hours sleep. The solution is to shove these thoughts into the background where they will rapidly dissipate, and it is much easier than you might think. And no, it isn't a meditation technique intended to cleans the mind of thoughts. A predetermined ritual that will lead us to sleep can resolve these difficulties. Your task will be to redirect your brain's activity away from the hypnagogic problem-solving processes.

Therapeutic Hypnagogia

Another of the difficulties is that hypnagogia is really good at working with internal conflict. Frequently, this comes in the form of an imagined argument with someone. These quarrels can get passionate enough that they go on for hours morphing from one heated exchange to another. Furthermore, Carl Gustav Jung, the father of analytical psychology, developed a technique that uses the initial states of hypnagogia for solving internal conflicts. He called the technique "active imagination." The patient, before practicing active imagination, identifies a problem s/he wants to probe and then goes to a predetermined psychic location imagined specifically for active imagination, and there the patient encounters autonomous psychic entities that s/he engages in conversation concerning the problem. Active imagination is sort of a controlled conflict resolution process. This technique puts hypnagogia into suspended animation and enables the patient to stay there for a considerable period of time, provided of course the patient doesn't slip into the downward spiral of drowsiness and go to sleep. If you are in therapeutic mode, you have actively blocked your path into Slumberland.

Creative Hypnagogia

Problem solving and therapy aren't the only diversions in hypnagogia. It is an amazingly creative state. It is frequently described as the door to inspiration. Peter Schwenger says:

Genius belongs only to the one who wakes during the night, the night that offers perceptions not accessible to daylight thinking. [page 73]

Thomas Edison used it for coming up with ideas for his inventions. August Kekule had the inspiration that the structure of benzene was a closed ring while half-asleep before a fire. Hypnagogia then becomes the scientist's laboratory where s/he tries on ideas and invents things. This is a really exciting state but disturbingly distracting when trying to get to sleep.

Fantasy Hypnagogia

We also tell ourselves stories while in hypnagogia and have all sorts of fantasies. Mary Shelley was in such a state when she came up with the idea for her novel Frankenstein. Mary spent the evening with her lover, Percy Shelley, as well as the poet Lord Byron, Claire Claremont and Dr. John Polidori, all discussing electricity and the regeneration of dead tissue. This provided the background for her hypnagogic experience once she went to bed. And yes, her experience came in the form of an image of a monster created by a man. Today many authors use it for creative writing. We have problems getting to sleep when we fantasize along some favorite theme.

Worry Hypnagogia

Nothing provides more of a distraction when trying to go to sleep than a strong sense of guilt and the frustration of having passed up an opportunity to accomplish something crucial to our happiness. Guilt can come in many forms, e.g., something cruel said or done to a loved one or having offended a colleague at work. Similarly, a lost opportunity can involve a potential love interest not pursued or a business venture we were too conservative to venture into. Life is filled with many roads not taken, and with hindsight, we can be full of regret that surfaces at bedtime. This sort of worrying can become emotionally inflated in hypnagogia and cause psychic damage. Focusing on these emotional issues can not only keep us awake but also cause emotional instability.

Spiritual Hypnagogia

Finally, we come to hypnagogia's counterpart to the oracle at Delphi. The auditory aspects of hypnagogia can seem to come from someone other than ourselves. It may seem that we are channeling a "voice from beyond." Hypnagogic imagery can appear to not be a part of the mind's processes. The images seem to come from "out there," even perhaps from an alien world. We see faces of people we have never known, some of them frightening, and we see scenes from worlds we have never visited. Some of the beings we meet appear to be from the Spirit World and may even provide religious revelations. Mystics describe it as "a universe endowed with a perfectly 'objective' existence and perceived precisely through the Imagination." [Corbin, page 3] One could very well imagine that St. John while in exile on Patmos used such an inspirational state to write Revelation.

The mind generally deals with these images and voices by invalidating them. "They are just the mindless ramblings of untethered thought processes," is the normal response. But if you take them seriously and focus on them, they can be profoundly interesting, and that interest can stall out the going-to-sleep process.

Since hypnagogia is useful for a multitude of activities, and probably more than I have listed here, it is easy to see how it can delay going to sleep, perhaps for hours. If you do this for a few nights in a row, it affects your sleep propensity curve, and once out of balance, you can have a lot of trouble putting it back where it should be. Hypnagogia is habit forming, and once you get a taste of it, it is difficult to walk past on your way to something as boring as sleep.

If getting to sleep is your priority, getting through hypnagogia quickly is your goal. Hypnagogia is highly directable, and some people have taught themselves, either through unconscious trial and error, or by stumbling onto a solution that works for them, to get through hypnagogia quickly.

...some normal human subjects can fall asleep with very short sleep latencies..., yet show no subjective, polysomnographic, or performance features suggesting pathological sleepiness: They are typically habitual nappers with a presumed learned facilitation of falling asleep. [Ogilvie, page 23]

You might expect that after making such an observation the next subject would be about how these "habitual nappers" accomplish this feat that all insomniacs would pay good money to know. Ogilvie does not, and we are all left in the dark concerning their solutions. But this statement does let us know that a method for falling asleep does exist, and this means that it is possible to direct our mental process toward sleep. If others have learned to do it, so can we. Now it is time to learn how to find a path through hypnagogia into Slumberland.
3

Sleep Preparation

Hypnagogia is a maze with a multitude of distractions, negative and positive. You can easily lose your way to sleep, as we found out in the previous chapter. Instead of letting your mind freewheel and latch onto the process with the most emotional energy, you should take control of your mental processes and lead them through hypnagogia. To do that, we create a mental path, a trek as shown in Figure 3-1, to travel down while trying to go to sleep, and you don't do this on the fly. You prepare well in advance and use the same procedure time and again.

Figure 3-1 Hypnagogia Distractions

First of all, we know that images are the most powerful part of the hypnagogic process; therefore, instead of allowing hypnagogia to supply them, we will develop our own images that will direct our activity. Images and activity are the answer. That activity will be a non-eventful, often-used trail to hike through the mountains. Using this general idea, we will construct an imaginary path to follow. We will have a starting point and an end point. The starting point should be an imaginary place that signifies the end of the day, and the end point should signify a place to sleep. The emphasis here should be on "imaginary" places. The entire trek is imaginary. You are trying to divorce yourself from the real world and invest your imagination in something to divert your attention away from the unbridled hypnagogic experience. You are creating a trail, and one continuous action along it, that you will follow through the hypnagogic maze.

You might think that using a setting you remember would be a good choice, but that would tie you to the real world and associations with the experience, and we want to use the imagination as much as possible. I will help you in that effort by providing words that will stimulate your imagination. The images and actions you then use will come solely from your imagination.

If this is starting to sound like a lot of upfront work to prepare for sleep, don't be alarmed. You only have to create this psychic trek once, and it is really easy. We'll call it our Transition Trek. It will be defined in detail and provided for you in the next chapter. You will then use it every time you need it, whether it is for use at the beginning of a night's sleep or later in the night as an attempt to return to sleep after waking. It can be the only path you ever create. It should be continuous, vivid but rather monotonous and flow through the mind effortlessly. After all, we are trying to get you to sleep, not write a novel.

As an aside, I want to give you an example of what you should not do. Dr. Christopher Winter, a neurologist and sleep consultant to many sports teams, provides the following advice to athletes with a sleep problem (May 15, 2015 New York Times article by Malia Wollan, titled, "How to Fall Asleep"):

"If you find yourself lying in the dark, unable to sleep, don't panic. Try visualizing the step-by-step minutiae of one activity. For a baseball pitcher, Winter might suggest 30 curveballs; for a basketball player, 100 free throws."

If this helps, it won't be much, since it is little different from counting sheep. But it has one aspect that is profoundly unhelpful. In both examples mentioned in this quote, they involve the most important and emotionally laden real-world activity in which the person engages. The emotional content of the imagined activity may very well derail the search for sleep before it can get going good. An emotional activity connected to the real world is precisely what we are not looking for. We will get into the negative role played by the emotions in more detail toward the end of this chapter.

When using the Transition Trek, above all else, you must concentrate on the images you create and the actions you perform within your imagination for each stage as you proceed. Remember, the Transition Trek is not intended to be interesting. It should be monotonous and uneventful, but soothing and pleasant.

Centering

The first thing to do after you get into bed is to look around the room and realize where you are. Get a hold of yourself. Come out of internal priorities and external concerns and just be yourself. This is sort of a "Be Here Now" moment, not in the existential sense, but in an ordinary sense. Get a grip on yourself and relax. You are about to go to sleep. Realize that the only reason you are there is to go to sleep. Sleep professionals want you to spend a lot of time on this, perhaps even a week or so to fully develop methods of relaxation and mind clearing. I have found this helpful but not mandatory, depending of course on your specific mental situation. However, even if you are really messed up, this method I am recommending will help you the first night. Do your detailed centering exercises, if you have too, but I will be provocative and recommend that you skip them and instead start the Transition Trek. The most I recommend after getting into bed is to read a book for a few minutes, maybe as much as a half hour, and then turn off the light.

Sleep Breathing

Even before visualizing the starting point of your trek, you should establish a sleep-breathing rate. Granted, breathing is an autonomic function that we do not have to consciously monitor, but sleep breathing is different from that which occurs naturally while awake, and it starts during hypnagogia. It is not much different than normal breathing, just a little slower and heavier. While asleep, we inhale a little deeper and exhale more fully, possibly with a slight pause between breaths. We breathe about twenty times per minute, which is one-third to one-fourth of our heart rate. Many meditation techniques start with the practitioner focusing on breathing. It is the gateway to our internal psychic depths, and establishing a sleep-breathing rate can trigger the engagement of other more subtle sleep processes. Remember that you are in this for the long haul, and your knowledge of how your body and mind function will become apparent as you solve your sleep problem.

Over time, I have found sleep breathing to be an extremely powerful beginning to the Transition Trek. As a matter of fact, a couple of decades ago, I used sleep breathing on its own as a method of enticing myself into sleep. Of course, this was long before I invented the Transition Trek. Once you have become accustomed to artificially inducing sleep breathing, it just might start happening upfront automatically when you decide to go to sleep. Not only that. Images of the trek will form more easily, be more vivid, and the entire process will have been strengthened. Establishing sleep breathing should not take more than ten or fifteen seconds.

Deafferentation: Disconnecting the Five Physical Senses

Another distracting factor is that when you close your eyes and try to drop off to sleep, you will at first become more highly attuned to your physical state. This is the first segment of hypnagogia. You'll notice an itch that needs to be scratched, your nose will start to whistle when you breathe, an assortment of muscle pains will surface, and you will have some difficulty finding a proper body position. Your feet will be either too hot or too cold. Do not allow yourself the luxury of becoming annoyed with all this because that will only take you further from the psychic state you are trying to cultivate. These irritants are normal and have a natural solution. Realize that they are a positive sign that hypnagogia has already started. Cater to them for a short time, but gradually allow your concern over them to drop into the background and actions to control them diminish.

Here is the reason you don't have to worry about these physiological distractions. The brain, as it falls asleep, starts to decouple from the five physical senses: taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell. That is the reason someone who is a world-class snorer generally doesn't wake over the horrific noise they are making. Mircea Steriade says in a 2009 article titled, "Sleep Oscillations and PGO Waves," that:

The defining signs of the period when one falls asleep are changes in brain electrical activity (electroencephalogram (EEG)) that are associated with long periods of inhibition in neurons located in the thalamus, a deep structure in the brain and a gateway for most sensory signals in their route to the cerebral cortex. The consequence is that the incoming messages are blocked in the thalamus and the cerebral cortex is deprived of information from the outside world. [page 22]

This means that an element of sleep onset involves your mind disengaging from the external world by severing (to a certain extent) its links with your body's five senses. It is quite obvious that we stop incoming light when we close our eyelids, and thus halt the incoming images from the external world, but quite a bit less obvious that our brain has mechanisms to reduce our awareness of the other body senses as well, i.e., taste, touch, sound and smell, when we go to sleep. Of course, this deafferentation is not total. Abnormal inputs from the external world can easily override it and wake us. An example would be the cry of a child. But if we didn't have this deafferentation mechanism, we would never be able to get to sleep. And it happens more rapidly than you might think. One second you have so many things going on that you believe you will never get to sleep, and the next instant you know nothing about your body. Furthermore, we are not aware of this ability. This ignorance can cause us to try to make our bodies perfectly comfortable before we even try to go to sleep. When that isn't possible, it can lead to irritation and escalate to anger. Nothing has to be perfect for us to go to sleep. Since this happens automatically, we don't need to spend any pre-sleep time on this, so let's move along.

Your Psychic Body

Just like the mind's eye, the other four senses also have a mental, or psychic, counterpart. This is an amazing fact. During the Transition Trek, our solution to all this unwanted sensory input is to replace each of the five physical senses with equivalent psychic senses, such as the images and sounds involved in dreaming. See Figure 3-2 and Figure 3-3. Transitioning awareness to psychic senses rather than actual real-world body senses is extremely important. Here is a list of what your body probably will be sensing just as you go to bed versus what you will be psychically sensing initially when you start the Transition Trek. Of course, all these psychic senses will change based on what you encounter as you progress along the trek.

These psychic senses do already exist and you use them all the time, particularly while dreaming, so I'm not asking you to do anything you don't already know how to do.

Figure 3-2 Psychic vs. Physical Senses

Figure 3-3 The 5 Senses of the Physical and Psychic Bodies

We'll get into the application of this in detail when we create our Transition Trek, but right now just realize that imagining one of the senses activates that psychic sense. All you have to do to situate yourself into your imaginary world is to imagine hearing an owl, imagine seeing the boat you are rowing, imagine feeling the oar in your hand, imagine smelling the pine trees, imagine tasting the salt water on your lips. You do this all the time when reading a novel, poem or short story. Authors evoke the psychic senses with descriptive words. The words trigger the reader's imagination and activate the psychic senses, the same ones you use when dreaming. To further engage the imagination while on the Transition Trek, the reader performs an action, like walking in a forest.

Again, this is just your initial education and requires no action on your part until we use the Transition Trek. Let's keep moving.

Your Psychic Voice

In addition to psychic senses, we have a psychic voice. We hear this voice as thoughts that run through our minds all the time. This voice is a lot like breathing in that it can work on automatic or we can take over the controls and direct it to say what we wish. It is not always so easy to shut off completely. But the amazing thing is that it can at times seem to be autonomous and say things that we never intended. When we are trying to go to sleep, this voice can be a real nuisance because it just will not shut up. We will also need to consciously take over the psychic voice and make it a part of the Transition Trek.

Emotional Distractions

Even with this problem of recognizing our physical presence in the world of the imagination solved, more problems, those that involve the emotions, can surface. The three emotions that can block your path most quickly are fear, worry and anger. I call them the Terrible Triad. Fear activates the "fight-or-flight" response, which produces physiological activity not conducive to sleep. You may not be ready to jump out of bed and run off into the dark, but a level of uneasiness about your dark bedroom or someone outside, actual or imagined, can stop cold your descent into sleep. I'll speak more about worry in Chapter 9, but for now just realize that worrying drops you into the world of problem solving. The most profound element of worrying is that by doing so, you unconsciously believe that you are holding your world together and if you don't worry, it will fall apart. But the worry world is nothing more than a distraction and a long ways from sleep. Anger has conflict at its root, and conflict is the basis of storytelling; just ask a novelist or screenwriter. Getting involved with anger can get you trapped within a storyline to resolve that conflict. It is hard to let go once you have activated your imagined antagonist (sibling, parent, partner, someone at work) and locked the conflict.

Here is the big problem with the Terrible Triad. They have physiological components, and the body starts to, among other things, sweat, and increase muscle tension and body temperature. Adrenalin flows, and we experience unfavorable changes in heart rate and blood pressure. Yes, the effects can be and usually are subtle, but subtle is enough to waylay sleep. This is not a scenario with a happy ending. However, the imagined images and other four psychic senses involved in moving along the Transition Trek will go a long ways toward leading you away from fear, worry and anger. You should make the effort to become accepting, calm, patient. This deactivated emotional state will also allow the deafferentation process, mentioned earlier, to start much quicker.

The good news is that we don't have to do anything special to establish this. It is a good idea not to get into an argument just before bedtime, and don't start doing your income tax, or grading papers if you are a teacher, just before bed either. Avoid engaging in activities that involve the emotional extremes, and it will be much easier to engage with the Transition Trek. Reading a boring story beforehand is a good idea.

Universally, sleep experts tell you not to sit in front of your computer screen before sleep. They have researched this and say it contributes to insomnia. This is probably a good idea if you don't know what you are doing when you try to go to sleep, but with the method I am going to show you, it shouldn't be a problem. Sleep professionals will also encourage you to make your environment, your bedroom, as sleep friendly as possible. This means eliminating all sources of light, sound, and establishing the proper room temperature. It is okay to do this if you really don't have much to do and want to get into this stuff. But here is the truth of the matter, and it involves deafferentation. Very dark room: not necessary. Ultra-quiet room: not necessary. Perfect room temperature: not necessary. Etc.

With all this knowledge about the pre-sleep state, I will now show you how to find your way through hypnagogic distractions, and it is much easier than you might think, based on all the problems and solutions I have identified. So crawl between the sheets, and let's go to sleep.
4

Charging the Gates of Slumberland

This is the most important chapter in the book, and the one in which we will solve your sleep problem. This is where we will create the Transition Trek. Why a trek? Several reasons. First, sleep needs to be defined as a place, which it frequently has been in ancient and modern traditions. We also know that we have difficulty getting there. That is what we call insomnia, failure to arrive in Slumberland. Getting there then has to involve travel of our psychic body to an imagined place where sleep will occur. Second, we need sleep-friendly activities that we can remember, and the human mind remembers nothing as well as it remembers locations. Memorization techniques used today by professional rememberers involve something called a Memory Palace to facilitate recalling large amounts of data. The concept of the Memory Palace goes back to Simonides of Ceos, a Greek lyric poet who flourished around 600 BC, and probably is an outgrowth of the thousands of years of oral traditions before the invention of writing. The technique employs connected spacial locations as repositories for remembering items that are otherwise loosely connected and difficult to remember. I developed the Transition Trek based on the Memory Palace and specifically set it in a fictional location that I developed over some months. I tried other configurations, but nothing seemed to work as well as this one, which I have used for over a year now, every night, multiple times.

Signs that You Have Entered Hypnagogia

After you have closed your eyes and started sleep breathing, you will experience some things that indicate you have entered hypnagogia. You have experienced them many times, perhaps even every night, but probably have not realized that they are favorable indications that you are on your way to sleep. The first was mentioned before: you become more aware of body irritants: you notice an itch, can't find a comfortable position, your nose whistles when you breathe, etc. Second, the images of the Transition Trek will become more vivid. This can be rather startling, although it should be comforting since it is proof the trek is working. Third, you may find that you have become more alert. This feels really strange and you may believe that you have come back out of hypnagogia, but you haven't. It is your intellect fully recognizing your psychic body instead of your physical body and becoming fully invested in the psychic world. It is also an indication that deafferentation is taking over. Fourth, you start losing control of your thoughts and veer off the Transition Trek. When you realize this is happening, don't become concerned. Again, it is good news. You are entering the latter stages of hypnagogia. Gently bring yourself back to the Transition Trek and proceed from where you last remember being. Fifth, you may start seeing fleeting images, some very strange, possibly accompanied by voices that have nothing to do with you or your trek. These are hypnagogic content you should not follow. They will rapidly disappear, and you can continue with the trek. Sixth, you may see bits of dreams, which appear as short sequences of images and voices that are associated with you but quickly dissipate. Take note of them but let them fade, as they certainly will. Seventh, by this time you are at the very edge of sleep, at the event horizon so to speak, and you will lose all control and be sucked into Slumberland.

The temptation is to equate this description of the hypnagogia experience with the seven EEG frequency stages of Figure 2-3. I suspect at least a partial correlation, but scientific research in this area is badly needed to confirm any such relationship.

The Psychic Location

To develop the Transition Trek technique, you first need an imaginary location, an area of the world, as a foundation for traversing hypnagogia. You can create your own if you wish, but let me set up one so you will understand exactly how to do it. We create our location using our imagination just as we would if we were creating a scene for a novel or a movie. You will return to this psychic location every time you wish to go to sleep. You imagine some pleasant place and then create a path through it, our Transition Trek, along which you will walk every time. You will convert the words I provide into images and other senses to center your psychic body in that world.

Here is the imaginary beach scene I will use for the start of the Transition Trek: The sun is just about to sink into the ocean to the west. Its rays set a golden glow to the waves as they gently lap the shoreline. The remote beach is at the edge of a forest with rolling hills and a lake farther inland. On the other side of the lake, we have a cliff with a path leading up to a large meadow, and beyond it more forest and a cave into a hillside where we will go to sleep.

Here is how we go about setting up our imaginary Transition Trek through hypnagogia. The trek I will create for you will be totally fictitious and from an earlier historical time with no electronic devices or powered vehicles. That is right; you have to give up your iPhone and Segway in the psychic world to get to sleep. This is not a long journey, and I recommend identifying seven major locations along the way since EEG research has indicated sleep onset has nine stages, the first of which is being fully awake and the last being fully asleep. That leaves seven that are actually a part of hypnagogia, and I'll create locations in the form of images along the path. We have little information on each psychic experience relative to each EEG stage. The one thing we do know is that at each stage we can experience images and to a lesser extent the other four senses. Occupying your mind with a continuous stream of images with a smattering of the other four senses is the key to getting to sleep.

Image Sources

We should take a moment to discuss the sources of images that appear in the mind's eye. First of all, we can resurrect images that have their origin in light entering our eyes from the outside world. These images reside in memory and become the predominate form of remembering, possibly even the foundation for all recollection. See Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1 Image Sources

Second, we have images that are evoked by the words we hear or read. When someone tells us of a place they have seen, we build our own mental image of it from their descriptive words, whether they come in the form of direct dialogue or from words on a page. We use the imagination as prompted by the words to generate the images. This relies on memory of similar things we have seen but also includes new details generated from imaginative material. They are hybrids. Third, we can generate purely original images from our imagination, inventing them out of whole cloth, as the saying goes. Fourth, images can come to us out of nowhere. They are alien to our consciousness and do not even appear to be sent to us by our own imagination. We experience, or are at least aware of, these images primarily in a hypnagogic state, and they, as mentioned in a previous quote, can be "more vivid than nature."

Our Transition Trek will be built in your memory by use of the second source, words on the page that evoke images. Of course, it would be better for you to have generated the words describing the Transition Trek since this would push your awareness further into the imaginative mechanism that resides deep within your own psyche. However, for illustration purposes and to get you started with the method, I will generate the Transition Trek for you. Perhaps later you will be able to generate one and then operate purely from your own psychic material as I do.

As already mentioned, you need seven locations for your Trek, all taken from the psychic location created above. At first, you will be leaving a place where you imagine having been for some time. The second will be a location and activity that furthers your psychic fatigue, a hill you must climb. The third, a lake you must swim. The fourth, a path up the cliff at the edge of the lake. The fifth, traversing the meadow at the top of the cliff. The sixth, arrival at your destination and having dinner. The seventh occurs when you get into bed. What I designate as nine individual scenes should bleed into each other and become one continuous action.

After the first Transition Trek, I provide three more for those who find the first does not fit their needs. I have used all of them but have the most experience with the first. They all fit the nine-part format.

The Narration

What we have done so far, i.e., setting up the seven locations of the Transition Trek, is only the thin storyline you will be using to get into Slumberland. We need to flesh it out to make it as real as possible. To do that, we create a narration that will provide the words to evoke the psychic senses as you walk along. This isn't a tome the size of a Stephen King novel, but a short story-like narrative readable in five to ten minutes, the normal timespan of hypnagogia. The narration is written in first-person, i.e., you are performing the action. You are the character in your narration of the Transition Trek. Concentrate on the images and other senses this narrative evokes because the residual psychic senses are all you take to bed with you, not the words. You should read through it several times before you actually use it. Your mind will conjure many more details than the literal words describe. Remember that the trek should be pleasant but not exciting. You should become accepting, patient, calm.

In Scene One, you have just closed your eyes. Envision something pleasant that happened to you during the day. Don't choose the most dramatic event but something personal that had nothing to do with anyone else. This is your last contact with the real world. Remember, the words are not important, just the images and other four senses that help you experience that psychic world of the imagination, along with, of course, the actions you perform. Focus on them religiously. The correct pace for imagining the trek is slow, pausing at times to visualize your surroundings if you think you are going too fast. Stretching it out to gain more time is certainly acceptable.

So here it is. This is what you have been waiting for.

Transition Trek — Coastal

Scene One: (Last fully awake thoughts.) I close my eyes and remember the bowl of strawberries and vanilla ice cream I had after dinner tonight, the firm fruit bursting with flavor with each bite. [At this point, consciously start sleep breathing.]

Scene Two: (First hypnagogic thoughts and images.) I'm in a small boat rowing ashore with the sun heading toward the horizon. Its rays set a golden glow to the waves as they gently lap the shoreline. Off in the distance, I see the sailing ship I just left behind moving out to sea. My arms are tired from rowing as the bow of my little boat slides over the sand and onto shore. I get out and pull the boat farther onto the sand, hear the lapping waves, and feeling the cool breeze on my face. I get splashed by a wave and taste salt water on my lips. I walk away from shore into soft sand that quickly becomes firm soil as I enter the forest and smell pine needles. I have thoughts of finally coming home and look forward to a tasty dinner and a good night's sleep.

Scene Three: The terrain quickly becomes difficult to traverse as I start up the rocky mountainside. I hear an owl off in the distance and the fluttering sparrows in the trees as they bed down. When I round the top of the mountain, off in the distance I see the sun as it slices into the horizon. I see two deer, a doe with a faun, as they disappear into the brush. At the foot of the hill, a long, narrow lake spreads out before me. I descend the mountain using the switchback trail to slow my downward pace.

Scene Four: At the shore of the lake, I strip off my clothes, slide them into a waterproof pack and wade out into the cool water. I've swum this lake practically every day since I was a child. I remember the endless hours of fishing its waters. The swim is effortless, and I feel cleansed as I reach the far bank. I retrieve my clothes, dry myself and put them on, feeling cool and refreshed.

Scene Five: Just up from the bank, a dark cliff looms over the shore. A narrow ledge used for generations provides a path from the bottom to the top. I use my left hand against the rough rocks to steady myself as I climb up and feel my legs gradually tire. I see the lake descending below and hear fish flopping against its surface.

Scene Six: At the top of the cliff, I see a meadow spread out before me in the failing light. Overhead the stars of constellations become visible one by one. The tall grass swishes against my pant legs as I step through it. I smell wildflowers and honeysuckle blossoms. Two cottontail rabbits scurry across my path, and a nighthawk skims the grass tops as it soars past. I hear the bark of a dog as I reenter the forest and see the light of a campfire through trees. Home.

Scene Seven: I enter a quiet cave using the light from the coals of the campfire. Two dogs come to sniff me and be petted before they return to their resting places. I smell roast meat, gravy and yeasty bread in the covered pots beside the fire. I sit down on a warm stone and eat my dinner and enjoy a cup of red wine.

Scene Eight: I take one last look out the front of the cave at the stars sparkling in the heavens. I walk off from the heat of the fire to my bed. I pull off my clothes and slide between soft animal hides. I realize how really tired I am as I feel wispy dreams overcome me and I drift off.

Scene Nine: Sleep — oblivion.

You should use this scenario — locations and narrative — as your own at least initially since it has been developed specifically for this task. It is already imbedded in your memory. Just read the description a few more times to fix it even more firmly. You can even paraphrase my narrative. Not only that, you don't have to get the narrative right. This is not an audition for your next big movie, not even if you are Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lawrence. If any part of it is disturbing, replace it with something else.

The first few times you use the Transition Trek, you may have to read it each night before you go to sleep. Also, when you first start using it, the first few nights you may come to the end and still be awake. I recommend just going back to the beginning of the trek and running though it again. Most people should see an immediate impact on their ability to get to sleep, depending on how clearly you can envision the images. Some may need a few nights for it to take effect. Focusing on images for some is a learned skill. But shortly you should be falling asleep before you get to the end and never finish. I have been using this trek for over a year, and now I rarely get off the beach. I use it three, sometimes four times a night after I wake. I find it especially helpful in the morning when I have woken up after a normal night's sleep but would like to get a little more anyway. Generally, I would not have a choice, but the Transition Trek can get me back to sleep when I feel indulgent.

Once again, don't get upset if you get sidetracked, veer off the trek and become engaged in some emotional subject. This may be a good sign. The closer you get to sleep, the more you tend to lose track of what you are doing and find yourself involved in thinking of something else. You may actually be seeing hypnagogic images. Gently guide yourself back to where you left off the trek and resume. Hopefully, the next thing you know, you will be waking up after a full night's sleep.

*

I have added the following Transition Trek because many people like to say a prayer before sleep. Some simply recite The Lord's Prayer, but it is short and isn't useful as a Transition Trek because it probably won't take us all the way to sleep. Besides, it is high on content and low on images. It seems logical to integrate the prayer with the Transition Trek. The trek I present here solves the problem by imagining a secluded holy place that we enter, address the Devine Being, and continue on to our place of rest. I have offered a couple of prayers, although I expect most people will wish to author their own in one or perhaps both instances. I was raised in the Christian tradition, and this Transition Trek reflects that. If you were raised in a different tradition, you will want to substitute freely to integrate your own.

I hope this trek will provide that extra measure of emotional comfort and spiritual wellbeing to relieve the trials and tribulations of the real world while providing images to get you to sleep. I put you in the hands of those you trust. Even though you may have physically showered before going to bed, you also have to cleans your psychic body. This is the spiritual ritual to get you ready for sleep, which is a psychic act. In the ancient Greek, "psyche" means "soul." So we are cleansing the soul.

Again, this trek is written in first-person/present-tense, so you will be in the driver's seat and in command of getting yourself to sleep in the here-and-now. The location for the trek is viewed as sacred. I've called it the City of God, and you get inside through a formidable gate. The City is walled, as were many large cities in ancient times. What I designate as nine individual scenes should bleed into each other and become one continuous action.

I have read recently that non-believers can also find it comforting to say a prayer. If you are among them, perhaps this will also suit your needs.

Transition Trek — City of God

Scene One: (Last fully awake thoughts of the real world.) I remember recently meeting two friends that I hadn't seen in a while. What a pleasant surprise. [At this point, consciously start sleep breathing.]

Scene Two: (First hypnagogic thoughts and images.) I walk a pebbled trail up a green hillside to a tall stone fence and come to a shiny but formidable gate guarded by a curious female with golden hair and dressed in a flowing white chiton gathered and girdled at the waist.

"May I enter?" I ask.

"Your purpose?"

"A safe place to sleep."

"State your name, and if the gate opens, enter."

"[Name here.]"

I wait for something to happen, but it doesn't open immediately and I wonder if it will. Perhaps I'm not wanted in such a sacred place. But then the right side of the gate slowly and noiselessly moves inward. I walk through and it closes behind me. I hear a "click" as it locks.

Scene Three: A paved walkway through a field of golden poppies, their fragrance enveloping me, gently curves to the left, then forks. The left branch goes on into the distance, and the right branch, edged with a strip of purple posies leads to a small church. I take the right branch. The sun has set, leaving the soft glow of twilight; brilliant pinpoints of light dot the heavens. The church reminds me of one you might see in the countryside: white exterior with a sloped red-tile roof and topped by a steeple surmounted by a silver spire. The church has no door, just an entry archway. I step inside.

Scene Four: Just to the right I see lit candles on two tall pedestals, one of rosewood with a flat gold circular surface for the candle holder, the other entirely of silver. To the left is a table with both unlit and lit candles, signifying others have come before me. I take an unlit candle and lite it by putting the wick in another's flame while stating the symbolism of a burning candle: "Body, soul, divinity, enlightenment. World peace." I smell the feint fragrance of bee's wax and hold my palm over the open flame to feel the divine heat. I move on through the foyer into the chapel listening to the echo of my footsteps on the stone floor.

Scene Five: I walk down the isle through the center of the nave and cross the transept to the apse containing the large but modestly configured wood cross. A red and gold carpet covers the kneeling platform. I drop to my knees, bow my head and pray: "Dear Father, please grant me the blessing of a speedy descent into a full night's sleep. Provide only such dreams as will illuminate your divine gifts and help me absorb your wisdom. Forever your faithful servant. Amen." As I rise, a priest enters from the left end of the transept and approaches. He is dressed in a white clerical collar and black cassock with a gold pectoral cross on a chain. "Follow me, and I will take you to the cleansing area to prepare you for a night's rest." We exit together.

Scene Six: The priest walks before me along a dimly lit hall to a steamy, laurel fragranced room with a perpetually flowing shower. He provides a towel and bathrobe, and says, "Your room is being made ready. Someone will come to take you there when you are finished here." He exits. I drop my clothes on the stone floor and enter the warm water. I lower my head and let the spray splash over me. I take the soap from the tray. At first touch, the suds tingle my skin then flow inward to cleans my soul of arguments, anger and uncertainty. I am left with a sense of calm and relief. I dry off with a fluffy towel that, as it passes over my body, feels as if it leaves a healing lotion.

Scene Seven: As soon as I'm dressed, a woman with dark flowing shoulder-length hair crowned with a diadem enters. "I'll escort you to your bedchamber," she says. She is dressed in the blue and gold raiment of an ancient priestess. I follow her up a winding stone staircase to an arched entryway with a lavishly decorated wood door. She opens it and stands aside for me to enter. The room feels much like a chapel with an unassuming cross above the bed. A single large window to the left spans the wall and looks out into the open sky, now shrouded in celestial darkness but punctuated with sparkling stars. The wall to the right is all of stone with a depressed shelf built into in it and within which is a small mattress, bed covers and a pillow. She retrieves some pajamas from a shelf, places them on the bed, and says, "I wish you a good light's sleep." She closes the door behind her as she leaves.

Scene Eight: Once she is gone, the room is still and quiet. I remove the robe and don the pajamas. But it is more than quiet. I sense an anticipation, an expectation. I drop to my knees, rest my arms on the bed and say a prayer. " Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen."

I then rise, slip between the silk sheets and rest my weary head on the soft pillow.

Scene Nine: Sleep — oblivion.

This isn't actually a trek, at least not in the sense of the Coastal Transition Trek. But you are still moving from place to place, and that should provide a scenario of sufficient length to enable you to successfully negotiate hypnagogia.

*

Here is a third Transition Trek. The environment is filled with people, although you will only interact with them initially. Again, what I designate as nine individual scenes should bleed into each other and become one continuous action.

Transition Trek — Castle

Scene One: (Last fully awake thoughts of the real world.) I close my eyes and remember a cream-cheese pastry I had for breakfast this morning. It was still warm from the oven, and I chased it down with a gulp of fresh-brewed coffee as the last remnants of sleep faded, and I become fully awake. [At this point, consciously start sleep breathing.]

Scene Two: (First hypnagogic thoughts and images.) It is sunset, shadows of trees and the adjacent hillsides growing long and then fading into dusk. I am hiking in a foreign country, very tired and seeking a place to sleep when I come upon a large stone structure resembling a castle. I see a sign on the door that says, "Rooftop Sleeping, Spaces Available." This sounds like me. The large double doors have ancient carvings of local deities along with lightning bolts and animals with human heads. I trip the latch on the door on the right, and it swings inward. I enter.

Scene Three: I am hungry, and this seems to be the place to solve that problem. Before me, I see a room filled with tables and chairs, filled with people, all of them travelers like me. Along the left wall an ordering bar with several waiters taking orders runs the width of the room. Beyond the counter, I see a bustling kitchen from where exotic aromas emanate. I make my way through the tables to the counter and order a sandwich and a bowl of soup. I walk into the crowd with my dinner, not expecting to find a space in a crowded room, but at one table, two chairs scoot apart and a chorus of voices beckons me to join them. I eat my sandwich, enjoying the taste of cheese and salami, and revel in the chowder while engaging in light conversation about where I am from and where I have been on my journey. Once finished with my meal, I thank them for their hospitality, deposit my dishes in the rack, and head for the stairs, before which a sign says, "To Roof."

Scene Four: I climb the dark stairs and, through an open archway, enter another room, two rooms actually. To the right through a window, I see the faint glow of the sky following sunset and stars starting to pop out of the darkness. To the left is a living room separated from me by a glass wall with two people seated, one on a sofa, the other in an easy chair, and two people walking about in animated discussion. When one looks toward me, I wave, but she doesn't respond. And then I realize that the glass wall is a one-way mirror. I can see them, but they cannot see me. This appears to be the actual quarters of the people who live here. At least in this one room, we get to see them as they go about their lives. This seems a little creepy, and I move on toward the stairs that leads up to the next level.

Scene Five: The stairs have become narrower and steeper. The walls are cold and damp to the touch. The air seems to get heavier with every breath, and I smell mold. A sliding glass door opens automatically, and I see a sign to the right, "Museum Closes at 10 PM. Use north stairwell during off hours." The museum is a maze of glass-covered display cases containing artifacts from an excavation. The walls are completely covered with standing displays of ancient sculptures of men and women, with an occasional ferocious beast in the midst of a kill. Several couples mill about taking it all in. After a few minutes of viewing displays, I take another look out a window at the dark sky and lights of homes in the distance. I decide to go on up and find a spot to sleep. I take the stairs.

Scene Six: A sign at the top of the flight of stairs says simply, "Library." Once inside, I see the walls covered with bookcases, all full of books, and several tables for reading. The most interesting tables are the two in the center of the floor, both overflowing with books. One has a sign that says, "Free Books" and the other, "Recently Donated Books." Between these two tables on a pedestal is a sign that reads, "To take a book, you must donate a book." I select a volume of Kafka short stories and donate one I finished weeks ago, Under a Sickle Moon: A Journey Through Afghanistan. I would like to spend some time in the library, but sleep calls. I take the stairs to the next level.

Scene Seven: At the top of the stairs, I pull open the door not knowing what to expect. I'm met by a gust of warm air and the smell of soap and conditioners. It is a laundry room with showers for both men and women, and toilet facilities as well. This is unexpected but certainly a welcome surprise. I pull off my dirty clothes and, after showering, shove them into a washing machine. I read my Kafka while they are in the dryer. Refreshed and certainly ready for bed, I take the next flight of stairs up to another door that I open and step out onto the dark roof of the castle.

Scene Eight: The roof has a 360-degree view of the countryside with a light breeze that buffets the national flag on a pole high above. In the distance, city lights and the glow of windows in homes try to crowd out the darkness, and the hum of vehicles on their way to far off destinations meld into the voice of a civilization. The buzz of voices in the dark confuses me at first, but my eyes gradually adjust, and I find a place with a foam-rubber mattress to park my pack. I unroll my sleeping bag and lie down on the mattress. The heavens are covered in sparkling stars grouped into constellations. I place my pack under my head and gaze up into the points of light. My breathing becomes heavier and I drop off.

Scene Nine: Sleep — oblivion.

*

Now that we have visited the sacred realm and climbed up a Castle, I will present a trek that simulates what we describe as "falling asleep" by coming down a mountain. When you cannot sustain the boring Coastal Transition Trek because of overriding real-life issues, you might need a trek that can peak your interest to keep you away from hypnagogic distractions. To do that, we have to take a chance by making it a little more exciting. You might get lost in it instead of going to asleep, but if the others cannot drag you away from your concerns, they are not any good to you anyway. This one is for the adventurous. If you are afraid of heights, it might not be for you. If you are a skydiver or flyer, you won't want to use it either because it is a part of your real world activities, just as was the baseball pitcher in the example of bad technique back at the beginning of Chapter 3. I designate nine individual scenes that should bleed into each other and become one continuous action.

Transition Trek — Mountain Descent

Scene One: (Last fully awake thoughts of the real world.) I close my eyes and remember the breakfast I had this morning — eggs over-easy, hash browns, with sausage and gravy. A mug of burnt-brown steaming coffee. [At this point, consciously start sleep breathing.]

Scene Two: (First hypnagogic thoughts and images.) I am standing in deep snow on a mountaintop, and far below I see the sprawl of towns with pockets of forests and rolling hills interspersed with a smattering of lakes and rivers, all being enveloped in shadows. I see the red glow of a setting sun off in the distance. The thinning clouds signify that the snowfall should stop for a while. My toes are frozen, and my cheeks and ears are numb.

Scene Three: This mountaintop is high above timberline. I look down the steep snow-covered mountainside and drop off an almost vertical incline into soft powder and start my sliding descent. I am not on skis. I'm just sliding down the mountain. The wind in my face is freezing. Thick gloves protect my hands, but my fingers are still stiff from cold. The snow is soft and my feet dig grooves as I pick up speed. I have an ice axe to slow me and help change direction when I see a boulder looming in my path. I lie down in the snow to brake as I approach a grove of trees I can't steer around. I walk past the grove and again start sliding down the mountainside in deep snow.

Scene Four: I come to a stop at the edge of the steep hillside where the soft snow has abruptly ended and become hard-packed ice. Here the mountainside has been in shadow for weeks and is frozen solid. The deep-orange sun still isn't quite to the horizon. I slowly approach the steep incline and sit down on the ice to strap on my crampons over my hiking boots. Using my ice axe for stability, I negotiate the icy slope along a switchback path. And then I come to the edge of another steep incline. This one much steeper.

Scene Five: I am starving, For quick energy, I snack on hard candy: strawberry, lemon and lime drops. I remove my crampons. The side of the mountain has a cable running down it that I have to clasp with my gloved hands and rappel backwards down the rocky face using gravity to pull me along. In places I'm suspended in air with my arms in contact with the cable and me high above the ground. The wind rips and tears at my clothing as the darkness deepens. I reach the end of the cable as the slope levels out.

Scene Six: The Sun has finally set, but the air is considerably warmer down here, and I start shedding layers of clothing and stuff them into my pack as I slowly zigzag between boulders and tree trunks. I approach a small building used as a storage hut. I am still a long ways from the bottom of the mountain, and the next section is a 2000-foot cliff. I unlock the hut, pull open the wood door and place my pack along with my discarded clothing inside. I retrieve another pack with my wingsuit. I'm going to fly down to basecamp.

Scene Seven: I notice the deepening darkness descending on the landscape as I slip my left leg into the wingsuit, inserting my foot into the booty and then work the right foot into its booty. I stand, then insert my hand with the straps at the end that fit between thumb and first finger that open up and stretch my batwings. My parachute, which I will need to land, is in a pack on my back. I then walk to the edge of the cliff and peer over and down to the ground far below. Complete darkness is coming quickly and my heart pounds as I put on my helmet and adjust the chinstrap. Then I pull the goggles down over my eyes, move to the edge of the cliff and jump off. The air whistles around me as I pickup speed just inches from the cliff face. I feel the arms and legs of my wingsuit inflate, and I perform a pull-up maneuver and glide out from the cliff just as some large boulders entered my path. I fly out into the ravine, still falling rapidly, and then negotiate a flightpath out over the creek that runs close to basecamp. As the ground comes rapidly up to meet me, I deploy my parachute and guide my descent to a grassy area next to the cave where I will spend the night. I hit the ground with a thud but manage to remain standing.

Scene Eight: It is completely dark now. I fold my wingsuit and chute and stuff them into their packs and start the short hike to basecamp using my small flashlight. I enter a cave, and build a fire to heat my dinner of freeze-dried stroganoff and a cinnamon apple crisp. I make some coffee and sit by the fire staring into the flames until they become glowing coals. I retrieve my sleeping bag, place it a ways from the coals and go to sleep staring into the red glow.

Scene Nine: Sleep — oblivion.

The Mountain Descent Transition Trek has the advantage of providing the sensation of falling while going to sleep. It should only be used when you are having difficulty getting one of the other treks to work. The others are purposefully boring so that their emotional content doesn't interfere with going to sleep. But when you have thoughts raging in your head, they can be too boring to push them into the background. Hopefully the Mountain Descent Trek will be interesting enough that it will lead you away from your worries and everyday problems and into Slumberland.

*

If one of these four Transition Treks works for you, this is as far as you need to read. You should give it a week or two to see how it goes. If you decide to generate your own Transition Trek, make sure you stay with the guidelines provided for the first trek. The treks should help immediately the first night and become more effective thereafter. If you are having difficulty after a couple of weeks, you should return here and read the remaining chapters. Also, once you become accomplished using the treks, you just might find your mind wandering even while you are viewing the scenery as you move along the Trek. This may not seem like a problem, and if it isn't, you don't have to do anything about it. If it does become a problem, with your psychic voice engaging in an argument or starting to worry while negotiating the trek, I have some further suggestions.
5

Controlling Your Psychic Voice

Once you have your Transition Trek images and other psychic senses firmly implanted in memory, you no longer need your narrative. The actual words are unimportant, and you should forget them and just move along the trek while activating all the psychic senses as cued by the environment. But here is the thing. Thoughts other than those concerned with the trek may worm their way into your mind alongside the images just the same as do thoughts when you are out hiking in the real world. And guess what? They are those same worrisome and troublemaking thoughts that have kept you awake for ages. If this becomes a problem, we need to add one last component: an Audio Track.

Using your psychic voice to recite an Audio Track while moving along the Transition Trek engages that extra level of concentration to ensure you don't revert back to fears, conflicts, or worries that might get your intellect involved in real-world concerns. If you want, you can simply recite the trek's words. But my favorite solution is to have a tune going through my head, one without lyrics. You might choose Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata or one of Chopin's nocturnes. The theme from Star Wars is a little overly dramatic, but Rey's theme from The Force Awakens might work.

If you choose a piece of popular music with lyrics, it is best to use one you have never seen in video form, because if you have, you will undoubtedly have images that will compete with the Transition Trek images. The words themselves will contain images and that is enough to contend with. Choose judiciously. I frequently use "When You Close Your Eyes" by Carly Simon because it is about hypnagogia:

When you close your eyes do you see   
White Lorelei, she's a dream   
She's not half as magic as she seems   
But she's so much fun to be with

When you close your eyes do you see   
Places that you've never seen   
Yet you've been there   
You've been walking on the edges of a dream   
And you're so much fun to be with

Big surprise, you've been informed you're not asleep   
Hard as you try you were never really meant to weep

When you close your door with a sign   
Do not disturb, are you disturbed to find   
That it's just as magic as it feels   
And you're so much fun to be with

This is a song from the 70s, but it is still available on iTunes as well as Amazon. Using a song has several advantages. First of all, having a tune running through your head is something we do all the time when out hiking. Plus, words with accompanying music make them easier to remember. A pleasant tune also sets a mood that can be conducive to sleep. Thus, music with lyrics along with the Transition Trek is a triple-threat to insomnia, an approach to occupying the mind's thought processes to ward off the hypnagogic images and voices. I am thinking you probably don't want to use something by Black Sabbath. But then again, if you are that special kind of person, maybe you do. Whatever puts you to sleep. Just remember that the song is only an accompaniment to the Transition Trek, and that the Trek's images are most important.

As an alternative, you can recite a poem or prayer you have memorized. I frequently use the first stanza of Kubla Khan (1798) by Samuel Coleridge:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan   
A stately pleasure-dome decree:   
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran   
Through caverns measureless to man   
Down to a sunless sea.   
So twice five miles of fertile ground   
With walls and towers were girdled round:   
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,   
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;   
And here were forests ancient as the hills,   
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

You could use the entire poem if you have a good memory for such things. Some will choose a prayer, and if you're using one of the treks other than the City of God, The Lord's Prayer will work well; however, if you are using the City of God trek, which already has the Lord's Prayer imbedded, you will want to pick something else.

Another of my favorite solutions is to use a few lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest because of its relationship to sleep:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,  
As I foretold you, were all spirits and  
Are melted into air, into thin air:  
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,  
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,  
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,  
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve  
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,  
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff  
As dreams are made on, and our little life  
Is rounded with a sleep. [A4, S1, L148-158]

Sleep, dreams and visions. It doesn't get any better than that.

Yet another option, and this is one I particularly like, is to memorize and recite one of Sappho's poems:

APHRODITE'S DOVES — Sappho ~ 630 - 570 BC

When the drifting gray of the vesper shadow   
Dimmed their upward path through the midmost azure,   
And the length of night overtook them distant   
Far from Olympus;

Far away from splendor and joy of Paphos,   
From the voice and smile of their peerless Mistress,   
Back to whom their truant wings were in rapture   
Speeding belated;

Chilled at heart and grieving they drooped their pinions,  
Circled slowly, dipping in flight toward Lesbos,   
Down through dusk that darkened on Mytilene's   
Columns of marble;

Down through glory wan of the fading sunset,   
Veering ever toward the abode of Sappho,   
Toward my home, the fane of the glad devoted   
Slave of the Goddess;

Soon they gained the tile of my roof and rested,   
Slipped their heads beneath their wings while I watched them   
Sink to sleep and dreams, in the warm and drowsy   
Night of midsummer.

This poem has the advantage of being set in the evening as the sun goes down, similar to our Transition Treks. The point of knowing the lines so well that you can recite them without hesitation or conscious monitoring while doing the Transition Trek is that you are occupying that portion of the intellect, your psychic voice, that will not ordinarily shut up. You don't try to shut it up, as many suggest, by using mind-clearing meditation techniques. You use this extra level of mental function for your own purposes instead of allowing it to engage in some heated argument or try to find a solution to a problem.

All of these auxiliary Audio Tracks will have images imbedded in their words also, and this then will create a situation where we have dueling images within psychic space: Transition Trek images along with Audio Track evoked images. When we are out on a hike in the real world, we have the real world that we see and are a part of, and we are also possibly engaged in a real-world conversation, plus we have the psychic world through which we simultaneously have mental images and voices inherent in whatever remote subject we are thinking about. Now we find that even in the psychic world, we have that same dual situation: a Transition Trek in which we are actively engaged, but also an extrasensory hyperspace with a voice that also needs to be engaged in this additional verbal activity. It is almost as if that psychic body we have been considering is as complex as the real-world body. It even has a voice.

The bad news. Sometimes at the end of the Transition Trek, particularly when you first start using it, you will still be awake, still in hypnagogia and a little ticked off about it. As I stated before, you should go back to the beginning of the Transition Trek and go through it again. Perhaps, you have done that, and it is still not working. What to do now? Well, get control of your frustration, and let's find out.
6

Chasing Hypnos

You have taken the Transition Trek, judiciously focused on images and the other psychic senses of the trek you have selected, and at the end although you are drowsy, you are still awake. As suggested before, you may wish to re-start your Transition Trek from the beginning or any place along it. If you have prepared in advance, you could start one of the other Transition Treks. These are certainly valid approaches. But you will probably run up against this situation at other times when you would rather go farther into the imaginative world instead of backtracking or jumping ship for another trek.

The mental procedure I call "Chasing Hypnos" will allow you to do just that. Hypnos was the ancient Greek personification of sleep, and he can be illusive, as your problems getting to sleep testify. But as luck would have it, Hypnos has a family, and we might seek their help in finding him and getting him to lead us to Slumberland.

Why adopt perceptions from ancient Greek mythology? In many ways and in some circles, the ancient Greek gods are the psychology of today. Psychological phenomena have much in common with what the ancient Greeks, who were the forerunners of Western Civilization, believed to be spiritual presences. Viewing what we experience psychically from their standpoint provides deeper insight into what is going on subconsciously and may indicate a way forward. According to Thornton Wilder:

...myth-making is one of the means whereby the generalized truths of human knowledge find expression and particularly the disavowed impulses of the mind escape the 'censor' of acquired social control and find their way into indirect confession. Myths constitute the dreaming subconscious soul of the race telling its story. [From Thornton Wilder's Introduction (1955) to: Sophocles' Oedipus The King, translated by Francis Storr, Norwalk: The Easton Press, 1980, page 16]

This revealing observation gives us an opportunity to extend our interpretation of psychic phenomena and gain insight into what seem baffling experiences. Plus, knowledge and use of these aspects of the mythology of sleep help activate elements of our unconscious and prepare us for sleep because they allow us to focus on the sleep state. In doing so, we see into that dark world.

The ancient Greeks had an entire mythology of sleep. They personified many aspects of that landscape, which help us understand some of its more important characteristics and relationships. But this ancient world is no child's playground, as you will learn in Chapter 8 when I introduce more of the characters that occupy the landscape. Right now, we will need to identify only four: Nyx (Night), Hypnos (Sleep), Hermes (Bringer of Dreams) and the Tribe of Oneiroi (Dreams). Nyx is the mother of Hypnos. She is the most ancient and stood at the beginning of creation. She now resides in a cave where she gives oracles. This fact may be helpful since we ended two of our Transition Treks in a cave. The fourth character, Dreams, is personified as the Tribe of Oneiroi, and all of them are brothers of Hypnos.

To make this work, you should do a little preparation as we did with the Transition Treks. In this case, you need to remember several of your own dreams, your Oneiroi. I recommend five, and they should all be positive in mood and content. No nightmares need apply. Since you couldn't record your dreams with a camcorder as they occurred, you will have to record them with words as you remember them. Hopefully, you will already have done this for some of your more powerful dreams. If not, you will have to spend a few nights doing so. In the middle of trying to go to sleep, you don't want to be struggling to remember a dream. Plus, your judicious selection will provide five positive ones at the ready. Your memory will flesh it out further if you need additional detail. If you have a recurring dream that isn't a nightmare, you definitely should include it. You should read through your description of the five dreams before you go to bed, if you have been having difficulty getting to sleep during the Transition Trek, just in case.

Just a quick word on why using previous dreams to get to sleep might work since we are in hypnagogia with the first REM state ninety minutes away. If you will remember back to Chapter 3 where we first discussed hypnagogia, some of the nine EEG wave states at times exhibited the properties of REM. People have also reported seeing phenomena resembling dreams during hypnagogia. Since it isn't impossible to experience something reminiscent of dreams, it is worth a try.

Here are my five dreams, all described in writing the morning after they occurred:

1. An Alien Civilization — 12 Feb 2015

Early this morning, I woke from an unusual dream. I dreamt that I was on an expedition to another planet. We landed there and discovered evidence of life, an ancient but apparently extinct civilization. Everywhere we went we found indications that, at one time, ancient aliens had built and maintained a way of life there. A couple of us drifted off from the others, and when we rounded a hill, we looked off in the distance and saw a rather modern city, one that perhaps looked like America back in the 1950s. We saw cars stirring up dust as they zipped along dirt roads. When we got closer, we saw that they were teenagers out raising a ruckus in what appeared to be outdated American automobiles. When we came among them, we created quite a stir. They were excited to see us. They grabbed my companion and pulled him aboard what resembled a flatbed truck. They seemed similar to us, yet they were different, alien, and we couldn't understand their language, at least not at first. I couldn't understand how an alien civilization could possibly be so much like ours. But then I thought that perhaps some other, more advanced, civilization had abducted some Earthlings and deposited them on this distant planet to start a new civilization. But it also seemed that they had heard of our music and seen our movies. They somehow had a link to our communication stream, which explained their excitement at seeing us.

2. The Dystopian World — 02 May 2014

I just woke from a dream of a dystopian world, a world where civilization and almost all the population were gone. Only a few people were left alive, but nothing bad was currently happening. I can't remember if we were going anywhere in particular. We were just traveling. We were spending the night in a building close to a freeway. I don't remember any trees, just roads and buildings. The front of the building, toward the freeway, seemed like a large room, perhaps the dining area of a restaurant. I remember that the front wall was mostly glass overlooking the freeway. I also remember bedrooms in the back where the rest of our traveling companions were sleeping. It was early morning, and we were getting ready to hit the road again. I wasn't afraid, although I was concerned about strangers. There wasn't any traffic to speak of on the freeway. Civilization was gone. What had happened to destroy civilization, I don't know. It was early morning throughout the dream, the light before dawn. I don't know who "we" were. I remember something about my older brother being there, or knowing he was there, but I don't remember interacting with him. I believe my father was with us, or he came in during the night. I also remember asking if we'd had any visits from other travelers during the night, and he told me that we had three. One of them was apparently still there sleeping in one of the bedrooms. We could have been also traveling with a couple of my aunts and uncles. Close to the end of the dream, I remember my father saying people were still good to each other, or he didn't say it but we knew it. He did say that everyone had predicted that people would be fighting and killing each other in such an unstructured world, but it wasn't that way. I believe we did have guns, but I don't remember having one myself. It was just the idea of guns that I remember.

3. The Old Home — 18 Jan 2013

I dreamed about an old home that I lived in within which I had a lot of old items, some that were left to me and others of my own. An uncle came to the home and was going to destroy it and everything in it by burning it down. I said that I had to get the things out I wanted to keep. I had to hurry. I started removing some pieces of furniture and other loose items. My uncle started setting fire to the place while I was gathering my things. Once he started the fire, my dream ended.

4. The Body — 18 Jun 2012

I dreamed that I was with a bunch of people who were giving me their condolences. I didn't understand why. We were outside walking, and when we started to cross the street, I saw something lying in the gutter among leaves and other debris. It was a body, stripped of clothing, and when I went to see who it was, my friends tried to stop me, but I walked over to it anyway. It was lying under the front end of a parked car. The car hadn't run over it. It was just lying there dead and discarded. By then I realized that it was me, my body. I felt great affection for it, and I was heartbroken that I was dead. I took a hold of my hand and moved my body around a bit, but I was dead. Dead, stiff and just simply discarded there at the side of the street. In the gutter. Under a car. But I had a new body and my friends wanted me to move on. I went into a home and went to a mirror to see what my new body looked like. I was surprised. I looked a little like a friend I had when I was in high school fifty-three years ago. I was not pleased, but at least I didn't look horrible. It wasn't as if I was reincarnated but more like I had just received a new body to replace the old one. It was not a traumatizing dream but not very pleasant either.

And then I woke.

5. The Dancer — 19 Nov 2011

I just woke from a dream. While visiting some acquaintances, I had a series of encounters where I got my feelings hurt, so I went to another area where I found my infant daughter. I picked her up and held her. I realized I hadn't done that in while, and I missed her. She was perhaps six months old. I kissed her and hugged her. Then the scene shifted, and I was in the same house and still feeling hurt, but now a young oriental woman was there, and she said something that hurt my feelings also. Instead of leaving me alone, she started talking to me about what I was projecting. She said something about what she needed from me. She was quite pretty, slim and rather small. Quite beautiful, actually. She seemed to be a dancer, and she made a pose and asked me to interpret its mood. I made a guess, but I was wrong, and she continued to teach me with poses and movement. This young woman kept saying, "What I want from you is to focus just on the movement, the position." She seemed to be telling me that I was projecting arrogance, which was also the way I was misinterpreting her actions. I still wasn't getting it right when the dream ended.

Okay, I realize that some of these dreams have aspects that are less than positive, but you should see what I had to select from. Sometimes dreams that are not positive have a seductive atmosphere. For example, Dream 5, during which the woman reprimanded me, left me with a good feeling just because of her interest in me. Dream 4 seemed to be about rebirth and had a puzzling positive effect although it was also about death — my own death and rebirth. The point is to pick dreams that you wish to re-experience, that will pull you in. Obviously, you cannot use my set of dreams as you probably do with my Transition Treks. The purpose in using dreams is that they connect you to a previous personal REM sleep state. Also notice that I have listed my more recent dreams first. This is because they are fresher and should provide more direct contact with REM.

Extending the Transition Trek

Now we need to set up the scenario that will extend your Transition Trek. I call this "Chasing Hypnos," and again it is written in first-person because you need to center yourself in the experience. This is written in much the same style as the Transition Treks, but I haven't separated it into stages since this has to be envisioned as the final stage of hypnagogia. It has much the same characteristics as a short story, which is frequently called a "fictional dream." But this fictional dream is based on that part of Greek mythology concerning Nyx and her offspring, as well as Hermes, who is Guide of Souls in the Underworld (Psychopompus) and the Bringer of Dreams (Oneiropompus).

As before, memorize the images and experiences of your dreams, and once you have, put aside the words. You should only start this extension of the Transition Trek once you have failed to be fully asleep after executing a Transition Trek. If you have used the Castle or City of God treks, you are not situated in a cave at the end. If this discontinuity bothers you, you might use the Coastal or Mountain Descent Trek first, but you stand a good chance of never making it to Chasing Hypnos because you just might fall asleep. Not that that is a problem. You should also ensure you are still practicing sleep breathing when you start this method.

Chasing Hypnos

I'm lying in bed having come to the end of my Transition Trek, but still not asleep. Then at the very edge of my mind, I think I hear voices. Slowly, I rise up and listen closer. Yes, I do hear voices, and they seem to be coming from deeper within the cave. No one ever goes there because it is a sacred place and forbidden unless you are called. But this voice does seem to be calling me.

I crawl out of bed, slip on my sandals and make my way toward the back of the cave using the dim glow coming from farther inside. I push back the opening's bearskin covering, enter a deeper cavern and feel a gust of fresh air. The voices have become louder, and I discover that the light emanates from a pale phosphorescence of the cave walls.

I smell a woman's perfume, just a slight but intoxicating scent. I round a corner, and there not far from me is a woman sitting on an elevated throne of modest size. She appears royal and dignified. An oddly dressed young man — winged cap and winged shoes — kneels at her feet. Seeing me, he rises and stands to her left.

I am apprehensive of approaching this woman, but she motions me to her. I can now see that I have unknowingly entered a large cavern. The throne is at the far wall of this darkened chamber, elaborately furnished in beautiful fabrics and silver and gold objects that project light out of an immense darkness. The woman is none other than Nyx herself, and this is her oracle. I stop, not wanting to approach a goddess, and wonder if I should have come into this part of the cave at all. The voice I heard, surely it couldn't have been her calling me. But she motions me closer. I approach, and the thought comes to me that she might be able to help. So I say, "I'm looking for your son, Hypnos."

Nyx is a small thin woman with deep-black hair that flows down her back and over her breasts. Her shoulders and arms are bare and are dark skinned yet a glow emanates. Her face projects a rather stern confidence that slowly turns to sympathy. "He is difficult to find. However, Hermes," she raises an arm to indicate the young man in the winged cap and shoes, "guides people in the Underworld."

I thank her and fall in behind the young man, who has quickly moved toward an exit through a tunnel that becomes deeply dark, colder, and descends rapidly. I stumble forward. I feel a breath of fresh air, and then wind and realize that we have exited the cave. I am now on an open plane too dark to make out anything. Gradually my eyes adjust, and I see a world populated with strange beings, each with a pale aura that distinguishes them from a dark landscape of dead, leafless trees and the ruins of a once vast civilization. I see three centaurs conversing heatedly and a herd of unicorns grazing in a meadow nearby. I'm no longer certain I wish to sleep and would like to roam about this world exploring all its magnificent attractions.

Seeing that I have been distracted, Hermes returns to drag me forward. "You are not safe here. This is not Slumberland," he says. I see what he means. A fire-breathing dragon appears in the heavens, flying above and singeing the already crumbling and ashen landscape. I then remember that the unicorn has the reputation of being the fiercest animal alive. Still, I would like to linger among them. Hermes drags me forward into an area of deeper darkness that seems a refuge from that mythical realm.

Finally, Hermes stops. I sense something before us, but I cannot tell what it is. He knocks on what sounds like a metal wall, and when a door creeks open allowing a pale glow to emanate, I realize that this is a bronze gate into a vast forbidden chamber, Tartarus. He converses briefly with a ghastly being that I wish I had never seen. The gate then closes only to reopen shortly with another ominous character emerging to close the bronze gate behind him but only after a stream of strange but rather familiar beings flows out with him. They form ranks around me, with Hermes taking my left arm and this other being, who can only be Hypnos, taking my right, and they drag me forward with the stream of familiar characters following behind. I can no longer see them without the light of the open gate, but I can hear them breathing and the sound of their clomping feet against cobblestones. They lead me off into a darkness so deep that my heart cries out for any light to break it.

Both Hermes and Hypnos turn loose of me, and while Hypnos tosses up a spinning carousel of blank pentagonal surfaces, Hermes, with the motion of an arm reminiscent of a magician, teleports each of the familiar characters onto a separate surface. Then I realize that these characters, the Tribe of Oneiroi, are my dream characters. There is the dancing oriental woman who tried to teach me, and my uncle who burned the old home. Even one of the alien girls has joined us.

These are my past dreams, and the images flash all around me. "You can enter any dream you wish," Hypnos tells me. Each is interesting and begging me forward. I enter one knowing that on the other side of this dream is deep sleep. If that one doesn't lead me to Slumberland, I will be able to transition into an adjacent one.

I join the alien girl just as oblivion slowly overtakes me, and the next thing I know, it's morning.

Yes, I realize that with this little story I have violated all my previous dictates. It is a strange, violent, and for some at least a highly seductive world, not the bland landscape of our coastal Transition Trek. But here I'm more interested in bringing you into contact with startling images of the dream world. It is a different approach to solving the problem, insomnia.

I have had to use this world to get to sleep a few times but only in the beginning of my sleep research. As I have said before, I now rarely make it off the beach of the Coastal Trek and only occasionally make it to the lake. I never come close to needing Chasing Hypnos, even though I would like to. Believe it or not, going to sleep using all these different treks, even what are supposed to be the boring ones, is an adventure, and I look forward to going to sleep each night and even hope to have a little trouble doing so.

Figure 6-1 Hermes' Dream Carousel

The way Hermes' Dream Carousel works is that each dream is similar to a room that you can enter. Here, Hypnos has arranged Hermes' dreams, your dreams, in a five-sided figure spinning like a carousel, a Dream Carousel. (See Figure 6-1.)

You select a dream to enter based purely on what you feel most comfortable with at the time. When you enter it, it repeats just as if it were a YouTube video. But you don't simply view the dream. You relive it. You are the primary character in your dream the same way you were in the Transition Trek. Each dream contains images and other psychic senses that are peculiar to your experience. Once you enter the dream, you might be able to recover more specifics to identify with your psychic body. But you shouldn't get overly intellectual about details. Remember that the only reason you have recalled the dream is to bring you closer to sleep.

You may see different dreams than those you have chosen, and Hermes may even bring along new ones, throw you into REM, and off you will go to sleep. Let your mind float inside Slumberland and enjoy the sights until you enter deep sleep. Of course, the paramount action on your part is to focus on the images and make them as real as possible. But also focus part of your attention on sound and the other three senses. Get the dream to come alive.

Since this Chasing Hypnos method involves dreams, the question then becomes, "Why can't I skip the Transition Trek and Chasing Hypnos and start out with the Dream Carousel as soon as I hit the sheets?" And the answer is that you can. And if it works for you, that is great. However, when you first get in bed, you are not close to REM. That comes ninety minutes later. Plus, you haven't prepared your mind by activating your psychic senses, the psychic body, for encountering your dreams. Yet, if it works for you, more power to you.

In this particular scenario, Hermes is merely a facilitator. However, we do have a situation where Hermes is in his own element. That situation is when we have been asleep, just gone through REM and are at the very top of one of our sleep cycles. We start waking up when we wish we could just reenter sleep. This post-REM sleep region, if it can be called a region of sleep at all since you realize you are waking up, is called, as I mentioned before, hypnopompia. It deserves a short chapter all its own.
7

Hypnopompia

Hypnopompia means roughly "to lead out of sleep." Hypnopompia occurs on the far side of a sleep cycle, i.e., on the other side of REM, as shown in Figure 7-1, which shows just the upper portion of a sleep cycle from Figure 2-1. Hypnopompia has been studied even less than hypnagogia. Some scientists do not even accept it as being separate from hypnagogia because of similar EEG waveforms. I treat it as a separate state because the psychic experience is different.

Normally, we go through REM and return to sleep, as shown in Figure 7-1a. Problematic sleep, shown in Figure 7-1b, goes from REM to a transition stage to being awake. This transition state is called hypnopompia. We then remain awake for a while and again go through hypnagogia on our way to sleep.

Hypnopompia, which is in some ways the mirror image of hypnagogia, has superficially much the same properties as hypnagogia, just in reverse order: sleep-to-awake instead of awake-to-sleep. Here is the crucial element that makes hypnopompia very different from hypnagogia. In the initial stages of hypnopompia, we are right up against REM dream images, whereas in hypnagogia, we go from being awake into the initial stages of sleep.

Figure 7-1 Upper Portion of a Sleep Cycle

As soon as we realize we are waking up, we can use those residual dream images to lead us back to sleep. It should be possible to transition back to dreams and then to deep sleep instead of waking. Waking is only normal when we are at the end of the last sleep cycle, the very last REM. This technique involves capturing real-time dream images and holding them in consciousness until the dream resumes. If the dream stalls out or ends, you can extend the dream by fantasizing it on into the future.

I have investigated this technique of trying to get back into REM and then back to sleep many, many times and have found it very helpful. However, this approach is not without its problems. Dreams are stories frequently with a lot of emotional content, and we might use the storylines to extend hypnopompia almost indefinitely. We can get involved in extending the dream and become so absorbed in that emotionally laden world that we never make it back to deep sleep. Sometimes dreams are fun to play with, but if your object is a good night's sleep, you don't want to get caught up in prolonging the transition state.

Dreams can be more emotionally powerful than we realize. I had a dream once where I was crying both in the dream and in the real world. The dream was so painful that it woke me quickly, so quickly that I experienced hypnopompia over a matter of seconds. The sadness I experienced was so powerful it was shocking. It was unbearable grief. But as I woke over a matter of only two or three seconds, the grief evaporated. It was as if a door to my emotions had closed. This was in the middle of the night and occurred during my second REM. We have little memory of these early REM states and remember dreams mostly in the last two sleep cycles. If you do wake quickly from an early REM state, the hypnopompia following can be disturbing, and you might want to get fully awake before trying to go back to sleep. Sometimes we need to reset our psyche.

Sleep experts say that if you wake and can't get back to sleep to turn on a light and read, or perhaps even get up and walk around while performing some menial activity. I argue against this, except in all but the most extreme conditions such as that I described in the previous paragraph. If you have had a nightmare, undoubtedly it is good advice. Under these unusual conditions, it seems that we are waking up fully because the dream was too emotional to handle, and we need to reset sleep by fully waking. If we allow the dream to end and become fully awake, we can then use our emotionally benign Transition Trek to go back to sleep and hopefully under more pleasant circumstances. I have also had times when sleep seems disturbing and abusive, as if something chemically has gone wrong, so I turn on the light and find an activity to take me fully out of anything to do with sleep. I need to reset my psychic state. But those times are rare. If you need a reset, do it, but don't make a habit of it. This can have a negative impact on your sleep propensity curve. You should reentering the Transition Trek instead and concentrate on images.

*

As I was finishing up editing this book, I dreamed that I was on foot in a road beside an open field that at one time had grown crops but was now fallow. One of the guys I was with shouted for me to look at what he had found in the field. It was a huge earthworm, perhaps forty feet long and maybe ten inches in diameter at the waistband. It was all stretched out in a furrow, but when I ran onto the field to take a picture of it, it took off. It was fast, moving something like a snake and also something like an inchworm. I chased after it but couldn't keep up. The worm disappeared into some rundown buildings and pens where sheep were running loose, but the giant worm had transformed into a lion. I became concerned, but the woman with the sheep told me to always find the mother, and I would be all right. It seemed that she was talking about the mother of the sheep, and the worm-turned-lion seemed to have disappeared.

I almost woke then, or perhaps I did wake. At least, I was conscious of dreaming but at the far edge of the dream rather than lucid dreaming. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had just entered hypnopompia. And this is what makes hypnopompia so much different from hypnagogia. I was both dreaming and awake. I would dream, become conscious that I was dreaming, and then wake again. I started working with the dream, semiconsciously, but nevertheless, the will of the dream, so to speak, and my own will started to intertwine and change the course of the dream.

The woman had a husband and they were both police officers. She showed me her badge. She was the head of some police organization, yet here they were living in this dilapidated structure, herding sheep. They were cleaning up the ruined building to live in and were a bit ashamed of their situation. Seems I was going to stay with them a while and offered to get some food. They were appreciative of my help.

The dream began to stretch out as I went in and out of sleep. At times I would be fully dreaming, but at others, I would be consciously extending the dream and changing it as I wished or it evolved on its own. The dream seemed to go on for two hours or so and became much more fantasy than dream. The man was no longer there. She and I were building a life together in the ruins at the edge of civilization. I became more and more awake, and the dream became complete fantasy. I was enjoying living in the mood of the dream. A few times I tried to use a Transition Trek to get myself back to deep sleep, but even though I did get back in REM, I couldn't get back into deep sleep.

However, I didn't have any pressing activity that needed my attention later that morning, so the amount of time I spent in hypnopompia was not disturbing. The sleep I got the last couple of hours was not as beneficial as it would have been if I had been in deep sleep instead of hypnopompia for the predominance of the two hours this was going on. Yet, we should not expect the last couple of hours of sleep to be as deep as those of the earlier part of the night. That is the nature of sleep — deep in the first part of the night and shallower during the second part. This reminds me of the "dead sleep" and "morning sleep" before electricity mentioned in Chapter 1.

This is the nature of hypnopompia. This is what makes it so different from hypnagogia. I have done this many times during the last couple of decades. The intermingling of consciousness with the deep resources of the unconscious is what makes hypnopompia such a valuable resource and so troubling if you want to stay asleep. Even though I didn't try to resolve an issue or work on a creative project, I could have. I have done that many times also while in hypnopompia.

*

Having exposed many of the normal impediments to sleep and how to solve them, we now come to an even more serious problem. Some people believe they will die if they go to sleep.
8

When Sleep Means Death

Search the Internet and you will find all sorts of truly heartbreaking stories of people who fear that they will die if they go to sleep. These troubled insomniacs are frantically searching for answers to the problem. Many of these people have experienced the death of someone close, a friend or family member, and ever since suffered from this malady. Others fear going to sleep for different reasons, so let's see if what we have learned about hypnagogia and hypnopompia can offer some insight and/or help.

Will the Transition Trek Help?

The most obvious help may well come from normal use of the Transition Trek. Without the trek, when you go to bed and wait for sleep to come, your intellect is in limbo. Your mind has nothing to do but ruminate over your problems and fantasies. This allows all your insecurities to surface, and for some of us that includes the fear of dying if we go to sleep. But the Transition Trek offers something specific for your intellect to concentrate on to keep it from indulging in thoughts of death. If these thoughts do intrude on your trek, do not become overly concerned. Simply direct your thoughts to the trek and continue. I realize that this won't be easy, particularly at first. But once you have established the trek as your going-to-sleep ritual, it should become your predominate mental process. Your fear will still be there but gently pushed aside by the Transition Trek. If anything in the trek relates to your fear of dying, feel free to change it to something more benign.

Effects of Deafferentation

The deafferentation process mentioned earlier in Chapter 3, which occurs during hypnagogia, may play a part in some people interpreting going to sleep as dying. Scientists believe that Thalamocortical neurons play a part in creating consciousness:

...sleep onset is associated with a massive and radical electrochemical deafferentation [interruption] of the Thalamocortical neurons that are believed to be the critical elements in the origins of consciousness. ["Sleep-Onset Mentation," by Robert Stickgold and J. Allan Hobson, in Sleep Onset, Normal and Abnormal Processes, edited by Robert D. Ogilvie, PhD and John R. Harsh, PhD, page 142]

Information from the physical senses to the cerebral cortex is blocked by deafferentation, thus the conscious mind is deprived of much of the information from the outside world, which then reduces consciousness. This increases your focus on the psychic senses during hypnagogia and in all probability contributes to the feeling of dying. You are losing touch with your body. The old cliché that describes sleep as being "dead to the world" comes to mind as being a result of deafferentation. The person fearing that sleep means death could be experiencing a powerful emotional response to deafferentation as it deemphasizes the physical body in favor of the psychic body. The physical body is always there, keeping us in this world and is at the ready should it be needed for real-world activity, but for some reason, these people don't experience it that way. At least, this is one theory.

The Wager

Here is an exercise to bring your fear of death into the real world, and bringing your nightly triumph over death into hypnagogia. Before you go to bed each night, make a bet with yourself that you are going to die in your sleep. Bet one dollar in coins — nickels, quarters, whatever metal money you have available. Lay the money out on the dresser top so you can see it. When you wake the next morning, put that wager that you just lost in a cloth or leather pouch and leave it there on the dresser.

The next and each following night, first open the pouch and look at all the wagers you have lost, and realize how mistaken the feeling was. If you feel that you are going to die that night, put down another dollar in coins. And the next morning when you haven't died, put those coins in the pouch with all the rest of the money you have lost because you didn't die. The accumulation of coins will then be a visible real-world verification of how unfounded your fear of impending death really is. Shake the pouch. That jingling is the sound of survival, your triumph over death.

Also, the second and each following night — and this is really important — when in bed with eyes closed, hold the image of that money bag, all that money you lost previously for being wrong about dying, in your mind's eye for a few seconds. This is the image of survival. Imagine you shake it. Those jingling coins are the sound of survival. All that money is the image of life overcoming death. Imagine you take out one copper coin and bite it. Notice how hard it is. Notice that copper taste. This makes the money real in the imaginary world. Now when you begin the Transition Trek, imagine taking that little money pouch with you tied to a belt at your waist, and as you descend into hypnagogia take notice of the imaginary money bag, its image and jingling sound as you move about, to assuage the fear of dying. In a sense, you are taking real-world proof of your own indomitable life with you into sleep.

The next morning and every morning, you should stand before a mirror, look yourself in the eyes and say, "I am alive." Then when you go to sleep that night, you must bring that image of yourself in the mirror into your mind's eye. Realize that you are alive and well in the real world, having survived the previous night's sleep and all the nights since the day you were born.

Sleep's Mythic World

To get deeper into this psychological subject, let's return to the ancient Greek's perception of the Underworld. In Chapters 6 and 7, we sought the assistance of Greek mythology to help us through the deeper recess of hypnagogia and hypnopompia. I was selective in what I brought forward from that ancient tradition because it is not all fun and games, and the problems we were discussing then warranted that limited approach. To help with this problem, we will need a more detailed definition of the ancient Greek Underworld. The thing to remember is that these personifications of the ancient Greeks are now viewed as related to human psychology. What were once viewed as divine entities are now viewed as psychic entities, i.e., they are psychological forces operating within the deep recesses of the human mind. Therefore, we will also appropriate some concepts from Jungian psychology.

We have already met Hypnos (Sleep), and his mother Nyx (Night), who stood at the beginning of creation. We also encountered Hermes (Guide of Souls in the Underworld and Bringer of Dreams). Dreams are identified as the Tribe of Oneiroi and are all brothers of Hypnos. But now we need to bring forward a couple more. Erebus is Darkness, the deepest part of darkness, and he is a brother of Nyx and uncle to Hypnos. And in particular, we must introduce Thanatos, Death, Hypnos' brother. Here is the way Hesiod (circa 700 BC) explains this sibling relationship:

And there [Tartarus] the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them [Hypnos] roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's broad back and is kindly to men; but the other [Thanatos] has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods. [Theogony, ll. 758-766]

Although Hypnos and Thanatos are brothers and share the same home, they are radically different in nature. The mythic world is deeply buried in what Carl Jung calls the collective unconscious, which includes these ancient Greek mythological figures. But also realize, and I can't emphasize this enough, that this ancient Greek personification of the sleep world should be viewed as a metaphor for the psychic phenomena we encounter there, and you will need a little coaching to understand its importance and how to interpret it.

When I constructed the first Transition Trek, I ended it at a cave simply as an afterthought. The cave just sort of popped into my head. I had no idea that this was symbolic of the abode of Nyx. Frequently, this is the way inspiration comes to an author, and the ideas that surround such an impulse are frequently fortuitously interconnected with other aspects of the subject. And now we see that the Coastal Transition Trek and the ancient tradition of the Underworld also provide a connection to our current subject. The connection is already in the minds of those who fear dying in their sleep. And we can now see why they might fear sleep because Death resides in this dark world that includes Sleep, Night, Darkness and Dreams. But Death is only one part of that world. The sufferers of this fear of death during sleep may be suffering from getting a glimpse of that dark world and miss interpreted what they saw.

Of course, we all know, and even the people who have the problem know, that sleep isn't death. Yet they believe it will lead to their own death. Perhaps it isn't even a belief but an irresistible feeling, a premonition. The emotion overrides the intellect, and my supposition is that it is because of this psychic brotherly connection between Hypnos and Thanatos, which is of course a relationship between two elements of our psyche. Plus, the two live together in the same house in the Underworld, within Tartarus. Frequently those with this malady have lost either a close relative or friend. Someone who has suffered such a dramatic loss has that event on his or her mind or in the back of it continuously, and it may profoundly present itself when they lie down to sleep in the dark, which also has close associations with death.

Figure 8-1 The Three Fates

Here is the good news. All of these ancient entities are subject to three other mythological (psychic) beings, the Incarnations of Destiny. These are the Moirai, or as we have come to call them, the Fates, shown in Figure 8-1. They control the Thread of Life for all mortals from birth to death, and not Thanatos, death himself. Perhaps we should investigate the Fates to see how they might help us understand this issue since they are in the driver's seat.

So who are the Fates? As just suggested, they are the Incarnations of Destiny. They control the length of our lives and manner of death. They give our lives a sense of inevitability. And in all probability that sense of inevitability has been overridden within people who have developed the sleep problem by coming so close to death, not to their own death but just being in the proximity of another person's death.

But this is not nearly enough definition of the Fates to fully flesh out their influence. The Fates are three in number. They are Clotho who spins the Thread of Life, Lachesis who measures the length of thread allotted to each person, and Atropos who chooses the manner of each person's death and cuts the thread. Plato in The Republic provides a concrete image of the Fates at work:

...these are the Fates, daughters of Necessity, who are clothed in white robes and have chaplets upon their heads, Lachesis and Clotho and Atropos, —Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, Atropos of the future...

The Fates are then the psychic entities presiding over life and the timing of death and not Thanatos. They are the daughters of Necessity, and they provide our lives with inevitability. Most of us seem to sense the Fates and relinquish control of this basic part of our lives into the hands of Necessity and not to the arbitrariness or contrariness of some sinister being. Just because Thanatos might have gotten a glimpse of us while servicing the soul of someone close to us that doesn't mean he will now come after us also. That option is left up to the Fates who work solely off of Necessity and inevitability.

After defining the problem within this ancient context, can we find an active solution to the sleep problem? Since the condition is not a reflection of the actual situation, we do have a reasonable chance of correcting it. The solution would seem to be to reconnect the sufferer with that sense of inevitability provided by the Fates. How might we go about that?

The one thing we learned at the beginning of this book is that the mind works most fundamentally from images. It would seem then that the person should investigate the deepest mental images they have of the event that caused their problem, or if it wasn't caused by a single event, the images associated with the problem. These images are the strongest part of the mechanism powering the mistaken perception, and they constitute the background for hypnagogic activity when trying to go to sleep. When someone lies down to go to sleep, the mental and emotional context with which they enter hypnagogia will in large part determine what they experience there. With death as the context, the results are not going to be comforting. Plus, we know that the background always provokes a response from hypnagogic processes. What seems to be happening, and this could be either confirmed or refuted by the person with the problem, is that hypnagogia is providing images of death. Once those images have been located, they can be identified for exactly for what they are, i.e., as belonging to events solely about someone else and specifically not about them. Once this has been achieved, they can then work at overriding or replacing those images with images concerning the continuation of their own lives.

Personal Experiences

The reason I wanted to address this problem is that I have more that just an intellectual relationship with it. To help shed some light on where I'm coming from, I'll provide a little information on my own personal experiences that involved death in various ways and have had a profound influence on my emotional life. Let me also say that I do not believe that my problem is as severe as some of those I have read about online. Everyone's problem is different. But perhaps my experience and how I dealt with it will be of benefit to others.

One night in 1949 when I was eight, my father stepped out the front door of our home and had a fistfight with a man who had come to kill him. It was one of his brothers-in-law. My father beat the man unconscious, but not before he had stabbed my father in the stomach with a pocketknife. My mother put me to bed with me asking if my father was hurt. She said he was fine and to go on to sleep. But I didn't sleep. I knew my father was dead, and she just didn't want to tell me. Turns out, my father was alive but had to be rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. He survived, and I visited him a few days later in the hospital. After that, my father kept a pistol under his pillow until one night he almost shot my mother in his sleep, a horror story I overheard frequently. Shortly thereafter, as I mentioned in the Author's Note, I found my imaginary girlfriend, who helped me get to sleep.

Twelve years later during the summer of 1961, I had just graduated from a two-year college and that fall was to enter the University of California at Berkeley. A friend of mine originally from England came to visit over the summer, and although I'm not at liberty to describe the events in detail here (see my Oedipus on a Pale Horse), my father would not allow my friend to stay there. We quarreled, and I decided to leave home. I walked down the hall to my bedroom to pack my clothes. My father followed after me, and went into his bedroom where he pulled a deer rifle from the closet and started shoving cartridges into it. I was across the hall in full view of him. Then my mother came in and questioned my father about what he was doing with the deer rifle. He said he was going to end it all. He then started crying and unloaded the rifle. My mother closed their bedroom door. I have never known if he was going to kill himself or me, or perhaps both. Him or me? The words have echoed down through the decades.

But that wasn't the end of it. Later that same summer, the event concerning my English friend escalated. He had been allowed to visit us and, in an act of betrayal, had committed a crime against my family. It involved a death threat my friend made to a member of my family, one so severe that it could have led to his own death. My father and I briefly discussed killing my friend as a fleeting option. But my family weathered the storm and everyone lived through the experience although the authorities deported my friend.

That fall, I enrolled in Berkeley and the events all seemed behind me. Two weeks into the semester, I had dinner with friends and consumed several cups of coffee. Late that evening, I went back to my room, lay down and tried to go to sleep. But every time I closed my eyes, the most grotesque faces I had ever seen came into view, faces of death. For several hours, I tried to calm myself and go to sleep, but it just wasn't possible. The faces would not go away. I got out of bed and tried to study, but the images of death were still there. I had little doubt that I was going insane. I now realize that these were hypnagogic images with death as a background.

I had an uncle who was paranoid schizophrenic, had spent some time in a mental institution, and I thought that I was headed down the same path. I packed a bag and went home. I dropped out of Berkeley and did not return, although several years later, I did return to university. For the next few decades, I had insomnia and an unusual fear of dying in my sleep, or at least the fear that I would be killed in my sleep.

But that still wasn't the end of it.

Twenty-five years later, I was working as a liaison on one of NASA's international projects that would fly on the Space Shuttle, and every fall we took a business trip to Europe. On one of these, I got together a small group, and we hiked hut-to-hut through the Austrian Alps. The second night out, we stayed in a hut (really a big barn-like building with a rustic restaurant) high up in the mountains. We all slept on individual foam-rubber mattresses stacked side-by-side in a loft. The problem, at least it was a problem for me, was that no light at all filtered into the loft. I got to sleep easily enough, but I woke only an hour-and-a-half later (one sleep cycle) realizing that something was terribly wrong with me. I was 7,000 miles from home in a foreign country whose language I did not speak with no family to run to. I didn't think I would survive the night. I would shine my little flashlight on the boards of the roof when things got unbearable, which was every few minutes. It was that aspect of not being able to see things around me so that I could escape from what was going on inside. Every time I got close to sleep, I would suddenly jerk awake. The blackness was the same whether I had my eyes open or closed. I didn't go to sleep until 5 am, when sunlight started filtering through the cracks in the building.

Obviously, I was afraid of what was going on during hypnopompia and hypnagogia. But if we take a closer look at what was happening based on the perceptions of the ancient Greeks, we see very specific and powerful references to sleep (Hypnos), night (Nyx), darkness (Erebos), and death (Thanatos). I was in the clutches of this close-knit family from ancient Greek mythology, and my perception was that my life hung in the balance.

Again, I had no idea what had happened. The context was that I had started psychotherapy six months before. This was in 1988. I still hadn't heard of hypnagogia or hypnopompia, and apparently my psychiatrist hadn't either because he didn't mention it when I relayed the experience. He did mention panic attacks, but that didn't seem to describe the experience either.

Of course, the main therapy topic had been that family crisis, so much so that my psychiatrist once mentioned that the story from the summer of 1961 had become a mythology. He was more of a Freudian therapist and nudged me in the direction of exploring homosexual impulses with my hiking buddies sleeping so close by me. But these were his associations, not mine, and they left me cold and discouraged. If he had been a Jungian therapist, we might have been able to make some progress by pursuing the nature of the sleep world and its influence in light of what had happened to me and avoided the assault on who I am.

The five years of therapy helped in many ways, but I still had problems sleeping. Yet, the fear of death subsided in the years following therapy but the insomnia did not. I began developing additional procedures to help me get to sleep. Among these were counting sheep, trying to hold my eyes open, reciting poetry and ruminating on pleasant topics. All this helped a little but made no significant dent in the problem.

In 1989, I started writing a novel and developed techniques close to sleep that allowed me to be more creative. After five years of therapy, being both helped and hurt by the experience (my doctor warned me that each treatment had its side effects just as does a pill), I ran onto the writings of Carl Jung, and in 2009, twenty-one years after the Alps episode, I started investigating what Jung called, "active imagination," of which I have spoken before in this book. For the first three years, I practiced active imagination almost every night and many times in the afternoon. I frequently had amazing experiences seeing vivid images and hearing clear voices that I could not explain. They seemed to be something entirely different from what I had come to know as active imagination. And then I ran onto an article on hypnagogia, and it explained everything I had experienced during my creative sessions as well as the images and voices. Once I had familiarized myself with the hypnagogic distractions when going to sleep, I started trying to find a way of minimizing the distractions of hypnagogia and find my way through it to sleep. That is when I came up with the Transition Trek. It has solved every sleep problem I have had since. I am also convinced that it has helped me attain an emotional clarity and stability I have not known since the summer of 1961.

I now realize what had helped me — and the solution came to me through research and intuition — was that I had gradually replace the images of that summer in 1961 with images of the health and vitality of the life I was then and am now living. Plus, and this is really important, I no longer dredge up images and voices that express the trauma of that turbulent summer, or those resonant images from the collective unconscious. Jung tells us that at times trauma resonates with and appropriates from the collective unconscious that which contains all the agony experienced by humanity from time immemorial. We don't need that weight on our shoulders, and the Transition Trek helps avoid appropriating that ancestral baggage during hypnagogia. Of course, we can never get completely away from what we have experienced, and we still have dreams that can waylay us with echoes of our most traumatic times. But dreams are where they belong and not in hypnagogia where the intellect is still very much active and where hypnagogia can contaminate it.

However, at night before I go to sleep, I do still have times when I tie up some of my life's loose ends just in case I die in my sleep. I have at times, when I'm in the middle of a major writing project, caught myself whispering, "I hope I can finish this before I die." I have been doing that for forty-five years.

More Recommendations

Sometimes it is advantageous to reconstruct the troublesome event or actually type out a narrative of what happened. You should lie back and type with your eyes closed, perhaps with a sleep mask, to see what images you can recover of the experience that provoked the death fear. Put the images into words. Chances are they are not dormant images, but very active and maintaining all the energy of the original scene.

When you get into bed and start to work the Transition Trek, first notice how you fear sleep. Remember that you don't actually experience the act of going to sleep but seem to disappear from the face of the earth to reappear in dreams. I notice this apprehension many times when I use the Transition Trek, and it is still a little concerning but not nearly enough to prevent sleep. As we learned earlier, the ancient Greeks realized how much sleep is like death. Honor that kinship. But at the same time recognize the difference. If you have siblings, you know how remarkable those differences can be. Sleep isn't death any more than you are your brother or sister. Envision the three Fates working with the thread of your life. Envision how they measure it out beyond the next day and had for every evening that you thought you were going to die but didn't. Realize that tonight is just the same as all those other nights when you feared death, but it didn't happen. Then start your sleep breathing and carry it, so to speak, into sleep with you. This is the breath of life, not death.

What is most important as you do all of this is that you specifically create images of these events I'm asking you to envision. Concentrate on those images. See the Fates providing more and more length to your thread of life. This is their process. It keeps getting longer and longer and seems to go on forever. Then start the Transition Trek.

When I created the Coastal Transition Trek, I didn't envision any part of it being about death. But after we swim the lake, climb the cliff and traverse the meadow, we enter a cave, which in ancient times was where they buried the dead. But we also realize that the cave is where Nyx, the mother of Hypnos and Thanatos, lives and gives oracles. In our cave, we find nourishment and much needed sleep. Plus, our cave has an exit in the far back that leads to Slumberland.

I wrote the scenario for the Coastal Transition Trek at night just before sleep over the period of a couple of months. I tried several different scenarios that didn't work. Some actually seemed to hurt the prospects of going to sleep and made me uncomfortable. But when this one finally worked, it was like magic. Several months later I wrote the other Transition Treks.

How can hypnopompia help?

If you wake during the night, take this as an opportunity to realize that you have just survived at least one sleep cycle. But carry it even further and since you have just come from REM, try to remember your most recent dream. If you can, try to reenter the dream and play with it. Celebrate having survived ninety minutes of sleep.

When you first start to wake the next morning, but while still in hypnopompia, take stock of what happened during the night. Ruminate over your dreams, if you can remember them. Be aware of how eventful the night actually was. Bring it to life. You didn't just fade off into oblivion for eight hours. You dreamed, you tossed and turned. Perhaps you got up and went to the bathroom and afterward had to get back to sleep. Did you have the same feelings of impending death when you tried to go back to sleep? Did you use the Transition Trek?

Remember that hypnopompia is an excellent state in which to solve problems. It has all the creative and problem-solving skills of hypnagogia, but it is also your direct verification that you survived sleep while still very close to it.
9

The Agony of Choice

If the Transition Trek method of getting to sleep has made everything better, what is the problem? It is the inspiration thing. We actually do gain insight and solve problems while in hypnagogia even though it can contribute to emotional instability when we get lost in insecurities and conflicts. Through the decades, I have developed a strongly directed creative relationship with hypnagogia and hypnopompia. And it isn't just me. Here's what Peter Schwenger's research led him to believe:

If the writer's inspiration is in some fundamental way insomniac, it follows that for all the complaining there is a desire to be sleepless, to reap the rewards of insomnia. [Page 72]

And it isn't just writers. I have found that for many of us with insomnia an aspect of ourselves wants to be awake during the middle of the night. I miss being awake so I can write and stew over issues that interest me. When I first go to sleep, I miss ruminating over what had happened that day and try to gain perspective on it. I also fantasize and enjoy engaging in what bubbles to the surface. I don't miss the worrying although something within me misses it a great deal and keeps trying to drag me back into it.

Even though prolonging hypnagogia can have a negative impact on your sleep propensity curve and your emotional state, this doesn't mean that you should never spend a little time before sleep working on a serious problem you need desperately to solve. When we do have a problem that we know is going to keep us awake regardless of the Transition Trek and that we may need our deeper resources to solve, we can still ruminate on it prior to sleep. Set aside a few minutes to do some deep thinking, but keep it to one subject if you can and go into it with a specific objective. This will hopefully let the air out of the big worry balloon, so to speak, but once it reaches a point of self-indulgence, you should cut it off.

Worrying is a problem that goes a lot deeper than you might imagine. When you take a contentious issue into hypnagogia, you work that problem with the help of the unconscious. The unconscious, according to Jung, consists of personal (shadow) and collective areas, as shown in Figure 9-1. We created our own personal unconscious when we were becoming socialized. It is the uncivilized parts of ourselves that were problematic and suppressed. Later in life, these unresolved issues surface again and work their way into our lives inappropriately. This is where therapy comes in. Therapy resolves those issues left open-ended as we ascended through childhood and became adults. Much of the shadow's content is reassessed and reintegrated with our better angels so that we become a more whole person. This is what Jung called the "individuation process," and involves building a bridge — named the transcendent function — from the unconscious into ego consciousness so that we might function better as individuals. We become "individuated." The changes we undergo are not always what those around us like to see, but we do become more fully who we are and hopefully suffer less internal distress. We build the transcendent function through deliberate controlled contact with the unconscious. This is not something you want to get into while trying to go to sleep.

Figure 9-1 Psychic Space

The collective unconscious is inherited and contains the archetypes of human existence. It is the same in us all. It contains a lot of monsters and myths, but it also contains science and mathematics, the arts, all culture really, and enables us to understand and interpret the material world and each other. We also learn to build a relationship with it — again, through the transcendent function — where we gain inspiration. We use the collective unconscious all the time because it helps us interpret information from the senses and form our relationship with the external world. We have a closer relationship with it while in hypnagogia, and if we learn to control hypnagogia, we can gain insight into practically any subject, including the spiritual world. Our relationship with the collective unconscious helps determine who we are and how we form our relationship with the external world.

Figure 9-2 Hypnagogia Disturbances

These two components of the unconscious contribute mightily to the images and voices we hear during hypnagogia and hypnopompia. The worst aspect of allowing our minds to freewheel during these moments of transition to and from sleep is that they can inflate our worries and conflicts far beyond their rational significance. If we use a guided approach to deal with these transition states and enter them with a purpose and an understanding of what resides there, they can be of enormous benefit. Directed and limited activities targeted toward these problematic issues can be productive if they have a specific objective and are not allowed to wallow in insecurity and uncertainty. However, even a reasoned, measured entry into these deeper recesses of psychic space can run into trouble because much of the collective unconscious is an uncharted wilderness.

Destructive diversions into the unconscious also have echoes that reverberate for several minutes. Once started, these processes are difficult to shutdown, and they pull information from the unconscious that can affect your entire night's sleep, including dreams. Remember, they have physiological components that linger long afterward. Plus, they diminish the importance of the Transition Trek. My advice is to stick with the narrow path of the Trek from the very first, and you'll have a much better chance of getting to sleep and staying there. Be disciplined. These delays, if they are prolonged, also distort your sleep propensity curve and you will once again experience insomnia. Once you've crawled between the sheets and psychically centered yourself, get on with the business of going to sleep.

Myself, I have found that not permitting all this worrying during these transition states has led to more emotional stability. I find it best to worry during the light of day where reality can oversee the discussion rather than within these deeper, ungovernable resources of the depths. I found this to be true late in life. I can't begin to imagine what a difference it would have made for me if I had found this technique for controlling my nighttime thoughts when I was young.

Another prudent choice to using the creative aspects of hypnagogia and hypnopompia might be to restrict these sessions to the last period of hypnopompia in the morning. At that point, you already have a full night's sleep, and indulging in a creative activity boots the mind into those inspirational resources. You can plan this session prior to going to sleep the previous evening.

As for conducting these efforts in the middle of the night, I have mixed feelings, and this is where the hard choices come in. If you do it for any length of time at all, you start negatively impacting the sleep propensity curve, and the effects ripple into the future. I have written during hypnagogia for as much as four hours at a time and practiced this for decades. Even when I got eight hours sleep — four before writing and four afterward — I was tired the next day. Sometimes the work I accomplish was amazingly creative and worth the hit the next day.

Too Much Sleep

When getting too much sleep becomes an issue, you know you have made a serious impact on the insomnia problem. I have run onto this situation during periods of little stress and have a few days off work. The problem with getting too much sleep is that it tends to flatten out the sleep propensity curve, and you end up spending most of the time in REM. Plus, you can become addicted to sleep. When you are sleeping too much, you don't access the really deep stages that contribute so much to your wellbeing. This can also lead to social problems when you become more interested in your dreams than being around friends and family. Balance is an important aspect of life. Or as the ancient Greeks put it: Nothing in excess. 
10

Afterward

Over time using the Transition Trek, you will develop the skills necessary to get to sleep quickly and reliably. I have done my best to relay to you all the research I have done and the experiences others and I have had through the decades. Figure 10-1 shows my sleep cycles for a good night's sleep.

Figure 10-1 A Good Night's Sleep - Sleep Cycle iPhone App

To get this curve, I used an inexpensive iPhone app called "Sleep Cycle" that measures body movement using the iPhone accelerometer. It isn't all that accurate, but it did provide a good indication of the times I was awake: at the beginning, once during the night, and at end. Just before 3 am, I woke and went to the bathroom. The rest of the time, I stayed asleep. The small humps occurred when my sleep was not so deep and probably signify REM, although Sleep Cycle has no way of measuring REM.

Occasionally, I do still have a bad night's sleep, as shown in Figure 10-2. I didn't think I had slept much the entire night, but as you can see, I did get a good measure of sleep. I repeatedly used the Transition Trek successfully, but for some reason I spent more time in REM, hypnopompia and hypnagogia. I was restless. However, even after one of those nights, the following day isn't problematic because I sleep so much on other nights. Plus, I have learned not to have such a bad attitude when I have spent more time at the edges of sleep rather than in deep sleep.

Figure 10-2 A Bad Night's Sleep - Sleep Cycle iPhone App

Generally, I now just step into my Transition Trek, and a few steps down the path, I am asleep. Sometimes I can just wave the trek in front of my mind's eye, so to speak, and I go to sleep. The solution seems to go beyond just successfully getting to sleep. It seems to be remaking my entire sleep landscape. The quality of sleep seems better, and I have more difficulty remembering my dreams, another indication of deeper sleep. Plus, I am more emotionally stable. Perhaps all that time during the night that I spent worrying, trying to solve problems and carrying on imaginary arguments, was emotionally abusive and spending more time sleeping instead of quarreling within myself has brought my emotional and intellectual perspective closer to reality.

I have found all the Transition Treks to be an increasingly effective method of getting to sleep. As I have mentioned before, at first using the Coastal Transition Trek, I was going all the way through to the cave and even entering Chasing Hypnos. But gradually, the time it took to fall asleep grew shorter. I started falling asleep before I made it to the cave and ate dinner. Generally, I made it to the lake but not the cliff on the other side. Then, I got to where I didn't make it to the top of the first hill. Sometimes, I barely got the boat onshore. And then I had what were for me really unusual experiences. I would just start the Transition Trek and fall asleep. I even had a few times when I just thought of using the Transition Trek, and I was already asleep. I have had times when I have fallen asleep in as little as five or ten seconds.

I know this sounds incredible to someone staying awake for hours before sleep overtakes him or her, as I once did, but it is true. Of course, I also have had setbacks. Sometimes they occur when I first get in bed, and at others they are when I wake during the night. But those setbacks occur during difficult times and still last only ten or fifteen minutes. They are the exceptions and are caused by specific worries or unusually exciting life events or physical states like illness or injury. I now have control of my sleep habits, and believe me, it is certainly nice to get as much sleep as I need practically every night.

Let me reinforce the fact that the Transition Trek method is not a trick used to get to sleep. This method is built on a scientific understanding of the psychic reality of hypnagogia and hypnopompia and the mind's basic imaging nature. When something goes wrong, when you have an overriding issue that your mind can't set aside to view Transition Trek images, at least you will recognize the problem. Family health issues, injury or a major problem at work can still, and sometimes will, override the Transition Trek. Just stay with it. It won't be until your propensity to sleep overcomes your need to consider the issue that you will be able to focus on the images of the Transition Trek and drop off. It only takes a few minutes to overcome practically every issue you will encounter.

You now know better than anyone what is going on inside your own mind while you are going to sleep. You know how universal the experience is and what can go wrong. More specifically, you may be able to backtrack to learn what went wrong to begin with that produced your insomnia. And since you are the only one who has access to what is going on inside you, you are the expert on yourself. You can now evaluate your sleep problems as they arise and investigate solutions. In doing so, you have taken control of your own mental processes that lead to sleep. You can even solve problems before they start affecting sleep. All of us need professional help from time to time, and if you do run into trouble, you have that option. It is no longer your only option.

*

As we come to the end of this book on pursuing sleep, we should look back on what we have learned. We have learned how complex and interesting these states (hypnagogia and hypnopompia) are. We know hardly anything about them from scientific research and must rely on what we discover for ourselves. Other cultures spend more time with these states and use them to their benefit. Yet, we try to minimize them, so we can get on with the productive parts of our lives. Generally, these are about the goals of a company and have little to do with us personally. We work for a salary. Coming from the standpoint of someone who spent decades in aerospace working on space projects, I now realize that my entire existence was structured by what a corporation wanted from me rather than me structuring my own life around what I wanted and needed as a human being. I didn't even have time to think my own thoughts. I thought what a corporation wanted me to think about. I slept during hours that would be conducive to my being ready to work the next day. Things like hypnagogia and hypnopompia were of no significance and had no purpose. But these states are a part of life. They can be a big part of life for someone who is interested in their lives as individuals and not a part of a corporation.

Those of us who have difficulty sleeping may have been given a gift. We may have insomnia because our lives are speaking to us. We should at least pay attention to it at times to reap the rewards gained from observing these alternate states of consciousness. As individuals we are involved in a human experience that we are trying to stamp out. If we used hypnagogia for the creative, spiritual, problem-solving, and entertaining experiences they were intended to be, we might be much happier. Experts often say that they don't know why we sleep. They do know that it is crucial to staying healthy and alive. By staying out of hypnagogia and hypnopompia, you may be missing a big portion of your life. But until we study these esoteric states and learn how to use them, we do need to control them so that they don't have such negative influences on our lives. Once we come to terms with these states, we might be happier and more productive. Perhaps even our siesta time should be a productive part of our work day. In that way we can harness our psychic energies for our personal, public and professional lives.

I want to repeat something I said back in the Author's Note: Nothing is wrong with you. When you were born, you did not have a sleep birth defect. You don't need medication to sleep. What you do need is a little help with the way your thoughts go off the rails during hypnagogia and hypnopompia. Scientists may not yet know why we need to sleep, but we do intuitively. That one-third of our lives is what makes the other two-thirds work.

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About the Author

David Sheppard has had an avid interest in sleep since he was a child. He has always read about sleep and discussed its characteristics and aberrations with anyone he could engage. He has documented many of his more interesting dreams. He has researched sleep literature for the last twenty years. In addition to In Pursuit of Sleep, he is the author of the non-fiction books Story Alchemy: The Search for the Philosopher's Stone of Storytelling; and Novelsmithing: The Structural Foundation of Plot, Character, and Narration. He has written several novels including The Escape of Bobby Ray Hammer and The Mysteries: A Novel of Ancient Eleusis. His non-fiction work includes two extended essays published in eBook format and titled Introduction to Frankenstein: Origins and Aftermath and The Eternal Return: Oedipus, The Tempest, and Forbidden Planet. Sheppard holds a bachelor's from Arizona State University and a master's from Stanford University, and he has also studied American Literature at the University of Colorado. His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, and in the Arvon International Poetry Competition Anthology (Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, editors). A veteran of many writing groups and conferences, Sheppard is a past member of the Rocky Mountain Writers Guild, having chaired its Literary Society and participated in its Live Poets Society and Advanced Novel Workshop. His career as an aerospace engineer spanned four decades. He has taught astronomy, novel writing, and Greek mythology at New Mexico State University - Carlsbad. He has also traveled throughout Western Europe, and is an amateur photographer and astronomer.
