Exploiting hypnagogic sleep onset for tulpamancy

[Yakumo]

A new study has shown that sleep onset (early nonrem N1 sleep, also known as hypnagogic phase) significantly boosts creativity and problem solving abilities if woken up before entering deeper sleep states.

 

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N1 is accompanied by involuntary, spontaneous, dream-like perceptual experiences that incorporate recent wake experiences in a creative way by binding them with loosely associated memories. Such hypnagogic experiences could be considered as an exacerbated version of awake spontaneous thoughts (e.g., mind-wandering) and similarly foster the generation of novel ideas.

 

Thalamic deactivation in N1 often precedes that of the cortex by several minutes, suggesting that executive abilities are not completely abolished during this stage. Consistently, subjects are sometimes capable of producing behavioral responses in N1 and often unexpectedly report that they were awake when awakened from N1. These observations support the view that N1 is a hybrid, “semilucid” state where individuals start to be decoupled from their environment and can therefore freely watch their minds wander while maintaining their logical ability to identify creative sparks.

 

All participants had a 20-min break in a dark room without sensory stimulation. They were installed in a semi-reclined position in a chair, with their eyes closed and legs on a footrest. They had to hold an object in their right hand, with their hand carefully placed outside the armrest. Participants were simply told to relax or sleep if desired. If the object fell (the sound of which awakened them), they were instructed to describe out loud what was going through their mind before it fell. We told them that their mental content could be of any kind: thoughts, images, reveries, and dreams. Once done, they were told to pick up the object and repeat this procedure until the end of the break.

 

Such a procedure was inspired by the famous inventor Thomas Edison, who allegedly napped while holding spheres in his hands. He reckoned that the spheres would noisily drop as soon as he fell asleep, waking him up just in time to capture sleep-inspired ideas.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj5866

 

I think this method may be valuable for those seeking to explore forcing in an altered hypnagogic state without the risk of dozing off, or are prone to involuntarily falling asleep during forcing or meditation.

 

All you have to do is sit or lay down with a sufficiently heavy object in hand in a way it will crash on the floor as you fall asleep, thus waking you up.

 

Active forcing in this state and / or upon waking up should produce some interesting effects, especially if you try to re-enter or re-enact the hypnagogic phase with your tulpa several times. It may also prove valuable for WILD.

See here:

 

I personally hate being woken up, especially by loud noises, but it should be worth a try.

 

[Mel Syreth]

Sounds viable, although my mind mostly goes haywire coming out of a dream rather than going in, so I might not be able to reproduce it. Still, I will be trying this later and review my experiences in an edit, thank you.

Edited June 21, 2022 by Mel Syreth

[Bear]

I have had many, dozens of positive and wonderful interactions with my headmates during hypnagogia but the tricks I tried to keep it going didn't work in the end because I get used to it. At first it was adrenaline, that subsided. Then I tried FILD and keeping one arm raised but apparently I can still fall asleep even with a loud noise or dropped arm.

 

There's probably a program that will flash lights through a mask or play sounds when your brainwaves reach a certain state, it may or may not help or be consistent. I'm a very heavy sleeper when I go to sleep at night and very light after a few hours. 

 

I have noticed hypnagogic and hypnopompic states and though the hypnagogic is much more viseral and impactful, the hypnopompic is more stable but eventually fades. It's weaker and more like just imagination. 

 

It would be nice to be able to do this on demand but I wouldn't recommend relying on it or getting dissapointed if it doesn't happen. We had many experiences and they were helpful in the beginning for a lot of reasons but it still shouldn't be something to be relied for progress.

[Mel Syreth]

Alright, it has been a week or two and I've only managed to induce this about three times, all of which just before going to bed late at night meaning when I was sufficiently tired enough. There definetly is something going on with this, the experience was almost similar to waking up from hypnopompia but noticably fainter. Something in between a daydream and a regular lucid dream I would say. Again, I'm more of a hypnopompic person so it makes sense.

I think this is a pretty good exercise if one wants to get started with dream memorization in relation to lucid dreaming, if anything, but for tulpamancy... eh, I'm not so sure, not for me at least.

Edited July 3, 2022 by Mel Syreth

[rogermorgan23]

the reason I have a tulpa began with a lucid dream . . .

[Ranger]

For a second I thought this was about hypnopompic experiences and not hypnagogic experiences. I have woken up half awake thinking about a dream, but I wouldn't consider myself more creative with our experiences with "dream logic"- basically we're total idiots until we wake up fully.

 

Aside from staring at cool "fractals" and sometimes other minor visual hallucinations, we have a hard time actually sleeping and rarely if ever achieve true hypnagogia. In effort to not think or to relax our brain so we're no longer paying attention, I can't say it boosts our creativity. While the latter may be more ideal, we're just letting it go instead of developing those concepts and ideas. There's also the likelihood of flat out forgetting it all.

 

If it comes up we can give it a shot, but I don't have high hopes going into this.