Dear subscribers,
You all have been so patient with this wacky 3-part series! I know that a trilogy on automatic, improvisatory, and hypnagogic writing practices is not the most down-to-earth way to kick off a poetry craft newsletter.
But waking up my mind to multiple modalities of creativity has been fundamental to my ability to stretch my writing to ever greater levels of resilience, resourcefulness, openness, and flexibility—and I absolutely believe that I’m not special in this, that anyone can experience an expansion of their practice if they invest time in multiple modalities for engaging with their own creative minds.
And that’s why I wanted to kick off lullabies & alarms with the weird stuff — it’s my way of advising on generative practices that allow you to write in such a way as to delight and surprise yourself first. In other words, generative practices that aren’t grueling or intimidating, and that don’t erode your confidence.
In the coming months, I’ll get into more nitty-gritty, earthbound topics, like revision tips; a poem’s geography; accessibility vs. abstraction; and a whole lot more.1
And… I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but I’m ready to confess it:
This monthly newsletter constitutes the first draft of a book I’m writing on the craft of poetry! Exciting!
Also, one piece of housekeeping: I finally figured out how to use this platform (Substack) to offer the free and paid versions as the same product. The only difference now is that with the paid version, you are financially supporting my writing career (THANK YOU). Please do share my newsletter widely, and thank you so much for reading.
Okay, onward to the weird!!
Half-Asleep & Half-Awake Minds
I am aware of these ‘fancies’ only when I am on the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so… In these fancies let me now term them psychal impressions there is really nothing even approximate in character to impressions ordinarily received. It is as if the five senses were supplanted by five myriad others alien to mortality.
- Edgar Allan Poe2
Most of us are familiar with the concept of an “inner voice”. We each experience it differently—some of us “see” thoughts, some of us hear them (and apparently some of us don’t have any inner chatter at all).
When the mind is in the process of falling asleep or waking up (in the hypnagogic or hypnapompic states, respectively) our inner voices and visions can become rollicking, surreal landscapes populated with all manner of characters.
Beginning in 2010, I had the benefit of the delightful mentorship of my London-based friend Peter Tunstall who, after having taught himself years earlier, showed me how to remain in the liminal zone between states (and not fall asleep) and record what I experienced. Now we’re writing a book together about it!
Auditory Hypnagogia
Usually I hear voices, speaking in monologue and occasionally dialogue, and sometimes I experience visual or conceptual phenomena too. It’s always strange and off-kilter; sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. What the auditory statements have in common is that they’re brief and they arrive with no context, yet with the implication of a very involved backstory—same as if you walk past a room and hear an actor in a film say one line. Here are some examples of statements I’ve heard voices say in my head while in the hypnagogic state (each of these were recorded on separate occasions):
Oh! the majestic shower of a shopping canyon.
*
A marble staircase. Each of your feathers standing down.
*
Women forests stand still.
*
He feels his half to say, and of Philbert's ghost.
*
Get a tense and plenty billion.
(This last one was spoken by a character I understood to be a mob boss, walking fast, speaking over his shoulder.)
*
One reason these are especially fascinating is because, as Peter notes, they walk the line between meaning and no meaning, sense and nonsense. If you’re a fan of surrealism, silliness, or zen koans, they can offer endless material for contemplation and laughter.
Hypnagogic statements—and the hypnagogic state overall—offer much to work with creatively! In Hypnagogia (1987), author/researcher Andreas Mavromatis lists a number of historical figures who have either used hypnagogia as a launchpad for creativity, or included it in their creative works or processes. Among these: Twain, Mellville, Wagner, Bradbury, de Quincey, E. Brontë, and even Edison, who apparently took naps in a chair while holding steel balls. As he fell asleep, the balls would drop noisily and he would wake up (having just barely entered sleep) with the answer to whatever problem he’d been stuck on.
My friend Peter once heard a hypnagogic voice say “Pushchair Philip.” He said it came with the image of a child in a “pushchair” (a Britishism for stroller) “wearing a rubber pig mask as part of a 1970s government campaign to encourage tolerance towards pigs.”
But I imagined it was the goofy nickname of a criminal… and so I thought of interviewing that hypothetical criminal’s grandmother (because why not?) – and the below illustration came about.
Conceptual/Situational Hypnagogia
I’ve experienced conceptual or situational hypnagogia without any auditory aspects, such as the following examples, written down by Peter as I lay half-asleep, dictating aloud to him one night for several hours. They came separately, often separated by several minutes of silence as I worked at staying within the zone, so to speak.
*
“A small penguin scooting along the ground on a board.”
*
“A giant part, like a parting in someone's hair, running along the ground, amber colored; it falls off into a small stream.”
*
“Letters hanging down like fins. I see them from below, as if we are both underwater, with me deeper and the letters just below the surface. Their fins push/swim once, then they just hang there, flaccid, and do nothing.”
*
“Somebody facing me, their face blurred like a quick pastel drawing. Their hands are held out toward me. The first hand holds the absence of a ball, the second holds a ball, and then there's the idea that there's going to be a third hand, but it isn't there yet, or if it is, it's really stubby and up to the left.”
*
“The idea that I—at least, I think that it's me—am dating somebody with strange brown perfect curls in his hair, who is congenitally joined to his father, attached by the bottoms of their legs, and I feel that that's going to be a problem; I reckon it just won't work between us.”
*
These situational visions can be creepy, funny, beautiful, or all three. But in the moment of experiencing them, I don’t see the humor, beauty, or creepiness. There is a kind of is-ness to them which I’m just sleepily observing. As I mentioned earlier, they often seem in fact dull, predictable, and not at all noteworthy.
Mavromatis writes that this is fairly universal – that while hypnagogic experiences can in retrospect seem terrifying/hideous/transcendent/hilarious, etc, the person experiencing them in real time usually meets them with an “emotional flatness”.
To me, this sets them quite apart from dreams, which I experience as quite extreme in their emotional affect.
Visual & Other Hypnagogia
Mavromatis’ book details some folks’ reports of olfactory and gustatory experiences, often accompanied by an image. I’ve never had such experiences, but it’s possible that you might!
You might also experience seeing only colors, or only designs, as the two illustrations below depict. Despite only rarely experiencing these myself, it does seem to be the most common form of hypnagogia:
Creativity
It’s extremely fun to work with hypnagogic output as creative material. I have a friend who contributed a one-line hypnagogic statement he’d collected to someone else’s cento, a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets.
And here’s a poem I put together using 3 of the descriptions of things I saw. I gave it the title to tie it all together.
excerpts from the diary of a blocked writer
The phrase I'm almost hearing
—and trying to capture—
is going up
through people through the centers of
their bodies
jumping
from person to person.
*
I’m underwater, just
below the surface. Letters hang down with fins
that push/swim
once, then just hang,
flaccid.
*
Some small person is holding up
my efforts. My
efforts are in the shape of a large metal
T.
The person is
standing below,
their arms wrapped around it
with the kind of look you’d get
if someone threw you up
against a wall
and held you
by the throat.
Challenge: Gather your own hypnagogia.
Choose a time when you’re very sleepy, yet not completely exhausted. The level of sleepy should be the one you might experience when reading or studying late at night and you start to nod off.
Write: Lie in a comfortable position in which you can easily put pen to paper without shifting. I like to lay on my back, a notebook open on top of my stomach, or on my side with the notebook next to me.
or
Speak: You can also set an audio recorder going, say out loud what you see/hear, and just transcribe it later. Or you could have a friend or partner sit quietly by you to write down what you describe to them.Focus on your sleepiness, but don’t surrender to it entirely. Stay curious. Close your eyes. Listen, and watch. It will be fleeting, subtle, feel like half-thoughts, half-sights. You may have to work to catch it, as it often has the very curious characteristic of seeming so boringly obvious as to be not worth recording—but if you write it down anyway, you’ll find when you read it later on that it’s anything but boring.
Note: You may need to try several times to get the hang of it. It’s a skill that needs to be honed, this paying-attention-whilst-falling-asleep. Don’t give up!
Also, be prepared (if you’re writing them down) to have a hard time detangling the written words from themselves—I usually write them down with my eyes closed, in a dark room… so they can be a bit hard to read!
P.S. Here’s a bonus, tangentially-related writing challenge! It’s fun, and good practice in thinking in nonlinear ways and creatively filling in gaps—or being comfortable with gaps being part of the completed work.
Writing Challenge: Overheard Conversations
Physical world version: Take a walk through a busy area (but stay safe, virus-wise!). Note down little scraps of conversation that you hear, but keep moving, so you only get one phrase from each conversation.
Online-only version: Pick a longer video that has people speaking in it (from Netflix, Youtube, etc) and click randomly through it. At each point that you click, write down whatever phrase someone is saying.
Create a poem, story, or drawing that incorporates and weaves together 3 or more of these gathered phrases.
Those of you who were in my recent revision workshop may see your very excellent questions answered in depth over the next several newsletters! And on that note, a huge shout-out to Dick Matheson of Burlington Writers Workshop, who wrote a glowing review of my recent revision workshop!
As quoted in Hypnagogia, Andreas Mavromatis, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1987. All images and quotes throughout this newsletter come from that same book, unless otherwise noted.