Wednesday 16 January 2008

Hypnogogic & Hypnopompic Images - 02

I am so pleased that the topic of Hypnopompia/Hypnogogia has come up.

This curious psychological phenomenon is something that I have experienced ever since I was a child. However it was a series of particularly vivid experiences that took place about twenty years ago that made me look into the subject more deeply.

I was in my office at work and then suddenly I was aware of the sensation of 'double consciousness'. I knew I was in an office in Colchester, England, but I was also somewhere else. It was as if something was taking place in my periphery vision. I focused in on this alternate 'reality' and realised that I was in a tree looking down at a man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. The language in which the newspaper was written seemed to be Spanish. 'I' (or whatever the creature whose eyes and ears I had hijacked - I suspect it was a bird) looked up and saw a large, very grand grand, urban square. I sensed it was Latin America somewhere - maybe Beunas Aires - when I heard the sound of a siren and I saw an ambulance weave its way through the traffic on the far side of the square. I then realised what was taking place and it all dissolved around me. I have no idea how long the hypnogogic lasted but I would say about thirty seconds. It was so vivid that I can still see it now as clear as day.

A second event happened about three weeks later. I was at home watching TV and suddenly I was looking up through what seemed to be a glass-topped table at a lady who was in the process of putting a cup and saucer down on the surface above me. Again I lost the image as soon as I realised what I was seeing. Again it is still vivid in my mind.

Although not immediately linked to CTF I think that this phenomenon may be related in some way to David Bohm's Implicate Order - the idea that at a very deep level of reality everything is everything else for examples the two particles in the 1980 Aspect Experiment are, in fact, the same particle. Could it be that I had, for a few swconds, linked consciousness with a South American bird and, possibly, a cat?

As I have mentioned in one of my 'comments' the book that may answer these questions is Andreas Mavromatis' Hypnogogia, The Unique State Between Wakefulness And Dreams. This can be read on-line at Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=dGgOAAAAQAAJ&dq=mavromatis+hypnagogia&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=Y9xbEvKhpZ&sig=myAIPiXIeEVO5QAHvkcQ43Gt2k4#PPR5,M1

What I find particularly interesting in all this is two individuals whose life experiences I believe are central to CTF - Philip K Dick and Georgio Di Chirico - both used hypnogogic images as a source of their respective inspirations.

2 comments:

SM Kovalinsky said...

What a fascinating post; and how unusual were your two experiences, yet how vivid. They are somewhat akin to a few described by Monroe: I suppose astral travel is after all a tapping into the implicate order as described by Bohm. I, and I am sure many others, will want to look at the online book. Thank you.

SM Kovalinsky said...

I have had a chance to link to the on-line text, and already have beome absorbed in it. The parallels drawn between the hypnagogic state and OBEs, as well as the evolutionary functions and purposive meanings of such mental states and images are examples of how this online book serves as a complement to ITLAD and the CTF thesis. Thanks again. . .