Hypnagogic Imagery

Having read through this morning’s posts, I got the impression that my definition of Hypnagogic Imagery differs somewhat from everybody elses, though I might be wrong.

I understand hypnagogic imagery to be the random colours and shapes you see when you close your eyes, am I right? Some people say they have very vivid hypnagogic imagery, what do they mean by that? vivid colours? vivid shapes? can they make the shapes out to be objects? am I doing something wrong, or have I simply got the wrong end of the stick?

Hypnagogic=falling asleep images
Hypnopompic=waking up images
Basically.

I think you got the proper idea, and are not doing anything wrong.

I think people use the term “vivid” to maybe describe it as unmistakable HI. or HI that is very clearly experienced while still partly awake. I don’t think many have much conscious control over the actual HI.

Sometimes my HI is just 1 single clear image of a random object. I remember seeing strange faces, and clocks. They seem to pop up from no where, and I can see them just as if they are real.
A lot of HI is vivid. Much more vivid than when you imagine a strange face or clock.

Madhatter,
What you describe (random colours and shapes you see when you close your eyes) are called “phosphenes”. They are retina stimulations caused by other things than light ( for instance, when squeezing your eye through eyelid ). You can see them when you go to bed and close your eyes.

Dream Addict is describing “hypnagogic imagery” : they generally appear during the transient state which precedes sleeping. These are very well represented images, often stood against a dark background, with strong feeling of light and detail.
What they represent is random, but it seems that the same person generally sees the same things : when I began to learn relaxing, I often saw skulls. :confused: I really don’t know why ! Now I see piles of cubes… :bored:

When trying to WILD, I never went after this stage, so I cannot describe what comes after… :sad:

Most of times, when I see HI, it’s sort of wake me up, and so the image disappears immediatly. Perhaps can people keep them a long time ? I would like to have the feeling of experienced WILDer about that…

i can safely say, i’ve NEVER experienced HI. :sad:

It doesn’t seem to be difficult too much. You relax the better you can and just have to be patient.

I takes quite a lot of determination to get HI. Just try to keep you mind active while going to sleep. you can do this by focusing on your body, breathing or you could try counting yourself to sleep.

If you do counting, try doing it like this: 1. I’m dreaming 2. I’m dreaming and so on to make sure that if you manage to get into a dream you will know it’s a dream.

i’ve tried counting down like that a few times, but i always get to around 80 (backwards from 100) and my mind wanders

Yes that mind wandering thing is hard to overcome.
You could try sleeping too little for a few days, then you will get more HI. The last week I have been trying to sleep less than usual every night. And now I seem to get HI after about 10-20 minutes in bed. And it’s also easyer to see HI if the room you sleep in is really dark.

doesnt HI happen everynight, isnt that the begginning of the dream state? I mean isnt the problem not being able to have HI, but having the ability to recognize that you are having HI and staying conscience?

BTW are u the same MadHatter from the Stk forums?

I don’t really know if you get HI if you fall asleep before noticing it. But yes the biggest problem is staying consious long enough to atcually see the HI. And it’s not hard to recognice the HI once you get it. I usually get different shades of black that moves at first. Then after a few minutes I start getting moving colors and then I start getting full images that flash before my eyes. This is usually when I fall asleep :sad:

Here is how you do it:

Be sure you are really tired first. Go to bed later than usual or whatever it takes to get yourself in a lack of sleep kind of tired mode. Next be sure to have a pen and pad nearby or your dream diary. Part of what happens is people forget the images they see if nothing is written down and it all kind of just blends in with the sleep memory and other dreams. So be sure to write down what you see no matter how tired you are.
Now for the fun part. Get something you have been meaning to read that is super interesting or fall asleep in front of the TV with a program or movie on that you have a high interest in and really need to see. The images you receive from this will be artificial but it will still be a HI breakthrough. Stay up for as long as you can watching or reading, you will get HI. It works every time. Just be sure to write them down or you will have another lost experience which happens every night anyway so make it work.
PD

Prairiedog, are you sure they aren’t hallucinations. Lol.

I think it was HH / HI

Sit your legs up, and fall slowly to sleep. It helps if you are hot, like in the summer. As you fall to sleep you will get HI, and it will make you wake up again.

LOL, no i am not sure.

HI is hallucinations coming from being half-asleep. :cool:

Btw, my HI usually looks like newspaper headlines or IRC

From what I’ve seen, HI is not swirling colors and so on. It’s actual images, which can trick you into thinking into getting out of the bed…

HI is very ephemeric, you cant really touch it, and it’s very shifty

I usually have lots of HI after I have played any shooter game for several hours. I just would begin running along those corridors as soon as I close my eyes. It is also possible to get a lot of hypnagogic imagery after a day when you made a long walk looking for… for mushrooms, for example. (There exist just eatable mushrooms, don’t they?) The image-matching pattern of a mushroom in the grass imprints somewhere in your brain so strongly, that you see it when falling asleep. Such images usually don’t include any movements; they are like a slide-show… Sometimes I have very weird hypnagogic images, like several pages of an article on linguistics, appeared one evening I had not seen any linguistics for half year… :eh: But in common sound hallucinations are more usual for me than imagery. :shy:

hahaa…yes, some mushrooms are edible. some are also poisonous or even deadly…so be careful.

[ link to fortean times issue 180 - Lewis Carroll article ]

i used to be able to get HH whenever i wanted. but lately have missed them in my life. anyway, my HH are usually ‘scenes’ like short animated movies or cartoons. sometimes they are very real in content.they are very strange because i cannot get a grasp on them for very long when coming out of it. they are much harder to recall than dreams but i’m sure if you trained yourself in the same manner as you do with dream recall you could get some interesting and clever glimpses into the the way dream imagery creates itself. you can hear some pretty weird things too, it’s not just ‘mind images’. that’s why most people refer to it as HH instead of just HI.

[ link to fortean times issue 163 - Hypnagogia article ]

Here’s how I get HI.

First of all, you need to be tired, so get that done first by what ever means you can.

Next you’ll want to go to bed, be sure to set your alarm 4 to 5 hours after you go to bed.

Then you’ll want to go to sleep with the alarm set.

When the alarm goes off you should awake extremely tired, by tired I mean if you turn off the alarm and go back to sleep you should be asleep in under a minute or so.

What you want to do is pretty much keep your mind awake while sleeping. Do this by repeating to your self that you are dreaming, which is actually very easy.

Within TWO minutes you will experience HI, I promise you that. The things I see are completely random. One night I saw a duck, and another night I saw a person doing the nazi salute, it’s completely random.

Just be aware that in under 5 minutes from when you awoke you’ll be going into SP, don’t be scared of that or the sounds that are soon to follow.

And the plus side to all this is that if you kept repeating to your self that you are dreaming you will enter a dream and be fully lucid from the begining.

this afternoon, during a nap, I saw true HI. basically it was a pattern (or a room) hanging before my eyes. It’s not just random colors. You can focus on it, and it wont go away, you can move your eyes and it will be still there! Even realization it’s a HI doesnt dispel it.