The edge of sleep

The teaching

As the projectors' tradition, read beside the study of hypnagogia teaches it.

The borderland

Between waking and sleep lies a borderland a few minutes wide, crossed every night and seldom noticed. Going down into sleep it is called the hypnagogic state, and coming up out of it the hypnopompic. The projectors call it the doorway, and their method is summed up in the phrase the Monroe Institute uses for it: mind awake, body asleep. Most of what the manuals describe as the signs of leaving the body belongs here.

In the borderland the body lets go first. The muscles loosen, the breath slows and deepens, and the sense of where the limbs are begins to fade. The mind follows more slowly, and for a while it is half in the day and half in the dream, able to watch what the dream is beginning to make. That watching is the whole skill.

The lights behind the eyes

The first signs are usually visual. With the eyes closed, the dark is not quite dark: it shifts with faint clouds of colour, specks, sparks and slow patterns of light. Monroe's advice for these first patterns is to let them pass as of no consequence. As drowsiness deepens they give way to images, often startlingly clear and detailed: faces of strangers, landscapes, rooms, lines of writing that cannot be read, scenes that change while one looks. They arrive without being called and leave without being held.

Voices and sounds

Sound comes too. Many people hear their name called, a snatch of speech, a phrase that makes perfect sense in the drowsy mind and none in the morning, a knock, a doorbell, music. Some hear a loud bang or crash, as if inside the head, just as sleep takes them; sleep medicine calls this exploding head syndrome and counts it harmless, however alarming it is the first time.

The projectors add the roar: a rushing like wind, water or engines, which comes and swells, often with the vibrations, and which they take as a sign that separation is near. It too is part of the borderland, and it fades if one opens the eyes.

The body loosening

As the body falls asleep, its outline in the mind loosens. The bed seems to tilt, and the body to float, sink, sway or spin. The hands can feel huge or far away, and the whole body may seem to swell or to shrink. A sudden sense of falling that ends in a jerk, waking the sleeper, is so common that it has a name, the hypnic jerk, and it is harmless. The projectors read these loosenings as the first stirrings of the second body.

Thought turning into picture

The borderland has a habit that teaches a great deal about dreams: a thought held while drowsy turns into a picture of itself. Herbert Silberer, who watched his own drowsy moments with care, gave a famous example. Thinking of how to smooth a rough passage in an essay he was writing, he saw himself planing a piece of wood. He called such images autosymbolic. Anyone can watch for them: hold a simple thought as sleep comes, and notice what picture it becomes.

The vibrations

The sign the projection manuals make most of is the vibrations. Monroe describes them arriving suddenly, a surging, pulsing current that seems to pour into the head and spread through the body, with a hiss or roar, while the body grows rigid and cannot move. They frightened him at first. In time he learned to meet them calmly, to smooth them by letting them pulse until they ran even, and to treat them as the moment before separation.

The teaching on the vibrations is short. They do no harm. They pass if one opens the eyes or moves a finger. Fighting them only wakes the body, while meeting them with calm interest lets them settle. A person who simply wants to sleep can turn over, and the borderland closes.

Holding the edge

The difficulty of the borderland is that it does not last: either the mind wakes fully or sleep takes it. The manuals give a few ways of holding it. One is to lie with a forearm raised, balanced upright on the elbow; as sleep comes the arm falls, and the small shock brings the sleeper back to the edge with the images still fresh. Another is to hold a light object loosely over the floor, so that its fall does the same. A third is to rest the attention on a single object of thought, a word or a picture, and to notice when other images begin to crowd in, for that is the borderland arriving.

The attitude that holds the edge is the same in every teaching: interest without effort. Grasping at an image wakes the mind, and ignoring everything lets it sleep. The watcher stays like someone on a riverbank, noting what floats by without wading in.

The morning door

The edge is crossed again on waking, and many find the morning crossing the easier one to watch, because the mind arrives at it rested. Waking naturally, a person can keep still with the eyes closed, let the last images of the night play out, and attend to the body's heaviness and to any sense of floating. The house keeps to natural waking: no alarm is set to catch the borderland, and no night is broken for it.

Keeping the record

A line or two in a notebook, written as soon as it is comfortable to write, keeps what was met: the images, the sounds, the loosenings, and whether anything like the vibrations came. Read back over weeks, such a record shows a person the shape of their own falling asleep, which is the ground every later practice stands on. If sleep came instead of any of this, the record can say so, and the night was not wasted: it was a night of sleep.