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Carrion Luggage #1104580 added December 28, 2025 at 10:15am
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Slumbermill
From Smithsonian (though a reprint from Quanta), an edgy article:
Neuroscientists studying the shifts between sleep and awareness are finding many liminal states, which could help explain the disorders that can result when sleep transitions go wrong
As with most things in life, "awake" and "asleep" aren't truly binary. There's always that transition. Sometimes it's gradual. Sometimes, like when you hear a cat puking at 4am, it's almost instantaneous. But "almost" isn't a true switch-flip; it's just faster.
For a very long time, I wondered if it were possible to catch that exact moment when awake becomes asleep, or vice-versa, but not only would that require consciousness on one side, but there's also not an "exact moment."
And I learned the adjectives describing these transitions: hypnagogic, for falling asleep; and hypnopompic, for awakening.
Look, when you have a tendency toward sleep paralysis, you learn these things, okay? There are nouns for the states, too: hypnagogia, for example.
The pillow is cold against your cheek. Your upstairs neighbor creaks across the ceiling. You close your eyes; shadows and light dance over your vision. A cat sniffs at a piece of cheese. Dots fall into a lake. All this feels very normal and fine, even though you don’t own a cat and you’re nowhere near a lake.
Worse, you don't have an upstairs neighbor.
To fall asleep, “everything has to change,” says Adam Horowitz, a research affiliate in sleep science at MIT.
Yes, I can feel my bones warping, my flesh shifting... oh, you mean everything in the central nervous system.
It’s still largely mysterious how the brain manages to move between these states safely and efficiently.
It's still largely mysterious to me how they define "safely and efficiently." You know that thing where you're falling asleep and suddenly you're literally falling? Okay, not "literally" literally, but your brain thinks it is and you wake up with your heart pounding? Yeah, that's not "safe" for some of us. That's called a hypnagogic jerk, incidentally, and by "jerk" it's not making a value judgement.
Sleep has been traditionally thought of as an all-or-nothing phenomenon, Lewis says. You’re either awake or asleep. But the new findings are showing that it’s “much more of a spectrum than it is a category.”
Much like life vs. death.
In the early 1950s, the physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago and his student Eugene Aserinsky first described the sleep stage categorized by rapid eye movement, or REM sleep—a cycle the brain repeats multiple times throughout the night, during which we tend to dream.
For some reason, I thought REM sleep was described way earlier than this. Must have dreamed it.
Though some evidence indicated that the brain could exist in a state that mixed sleep and wakefulness, it was largely ignored. It was considered too complicated and variable, counter to most researchers’ tightly defined view of sleep.
This sort of thing can encourage binary thinking: all or nothing, black or white. "It's too hard to study" is a legitimate thing when you're first delving into something, but the truth is usually more complicated. It's like the joke about physicists: "First, assume a perfectly spherical cow..."
Around the time that Loomis was conducting EEG experiments in his mansion, [Salvador Dali] was experimenting with his own transitions into sleep. As he described it in his 1948 book, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, he would sit in a “bony armchair, preferably of Spanish style,” while loosely holding a heavy key in one palm above an upside-down plate on the floor. As he drifted off, his hands would slacken—and eventually, the key would fall through his fingers. The sudden clack of the key hitting the plate would wake him.
I remember reading that book, years ago, because I've long been a fan of the dreamlike images of surrealism. I remember he called it "sleep with a key." The key, of course, I felt was symbolic, as in unlocking a mysterious door; it could, presumably, have been any similar object, like a nail or a large coin.
Other great minds, including Thomas Edison and Edgar Allan Poe, shared his interest in and experimentation with what is known as the hypnagogic state—the early window of sleep when we start to experience mental imagery while we’re still awake.
Edison can bite my ass, but that does explain quite a bit about Poe.
In 2021, a group of researchers at the Paris Brain Institute, including Andrillon, discovered that these self-experimenters had gotten it right. Waking up from this earliest sleep stage, known as N1, seemed to put people in a “creative sweet spot.” People who woke up after spending around 15 seconds in the hypnagogic state were nearly three times as likely to discover a hidden rule in a mathematical problem. A couple years later, another study, led by Horowitz at MIT, found that it’s possible to further boost creativity in people emerging from this state by guiding what they dream about.
Much more recent research, and, I imagine, of particular interest to writers.
“We could think that there’s a function” to these mental experiences, says Sidarta Ribeiro, a neuroscientist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. “But maybe there isn’t. Maybe it’s a byproduct of what’s going on in the brain.”
I feel like the Industrial Revolution trained us all to think in terms of function or purpose. "We kept cats around because they're good at pest control; therefore, if a cat is not good at pest control, it has no value." Which is, of course, bullshit; what value does art have? Of course, most art doesn't wake you up by puking at 4am, but my point stands.
Other times, there are things we think have no function, but we discover one, like the vermiform appendix in humans.
Mostly, though, I think even if there's not a clear evolutionary advantage to some feature, we can turn it into one, and I think the hypnagogic state might be one of those things, turning a byproduct of our need for sleep into a wellspring of creativity.
The article goes on to explore that more mysterious side of things, awakening. I'm skipping that bit, even though it's interesting. Then they get into sleep disorders, which of course are interesting to me, but your experience may vary.
Worst of all, though, for others if not for me, is that I've discovered in myself a tendency to pun in my sleep, and sometimes even remember the puns upon awakening. Hence the title of today's entry. |
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