Hypnosis on the cusp of sleep

In the movie "What the 'Bleep' Do We Know?" a panel of quantam physicists posit that the brain elicits the same response when a stimulis is imagined as when it is actually physically in front of your eyes. So when you imagine a naked, sexy woman, the same areas of the brain light up and become active, the same chemicals are released and bond to the same receptors, and the same emotional response is activated in the body as if the woman was actually there on your bed with you (awooh!). The question these scientists then ask is, who is the observer? Are your eyes actually observing physical things that are really taking place, or is your mind making them up and creating them somewhere deep in the middle of entanglements of neurons in the center of your brain? If the latter is the case, why haven't we found the little man perched on the pineal gland who is busy all day and night fabricating images and rewiring our electrical system to react with them?

So far, no little man has been discovered. And no one yet has been able to isolate a physical entity that is a thought. When scientists peel back the scalp and peer into the layers of our brain, all they find is fleshy brain matter. When they run chemical and electrical tests, they only find little drops of serotonin and melontonin, and little charges of electricty. Hardly a TV set with mirrors reflecting sexy women dancing from our eyes to our brains.

When the poet Walt Whitman died, he donated his brain to be studied at a lab in NY. One afternoon, an assistant was transferring his brain from a storage tank to a scale when he dropped the brain and it fell to the ground and splattered on the floor. Here was the container of some of the greatest American thought up until that time, and it was glopped on the floor like a pile of vomit and shit.

Perhaps that's really all we are in the end. A soggy pile of vomit and flesh stumbling around an empty, hollow, spacious vacuum while we invent images to distract us from the grim, meat-hook realities of our empty, hollow, spacious existence.

I set out to bridge the gap between physical image and imagined image. I figured engaging with the moment between waking and sleeping would be a good place to start, considering that when you dream you both imagine images that are not physically there, and your brain and body replicate responses that take place as if those images really are there.

Engaging with sleep if difficult enough, but to freeze-frame the moment when you are half asleep and half awake is a cumbersome challenge. My goal was to freeze my thoughts at the point where dream images are flowing through my head while actually remaining conscious so that I could observe where these images are coming from, what they are exactly and how my body is reacting, and then I hoped to analyze this and come to some conclusion about real images and imagined images.

Impossible, you say. How can you be dreaming and remain conscious at the same time?

To reach this state of being, I employed a non-benzodiazapam hypnotic called Zoldipem tartrate, which I secured through the Asian black market. This is a very dangerous sleeping pill used to treat accute insomnia. Unless you have consulted with your doctor or are an experienced psychonaut, DO NOT take this medication. You will become discombobulated and possibly panic, leading to hellishly intense hallucinations.

I knew I had chosen the correct doorway to the inner universe when I read about the side effects on the warning label. The very first side effect listed: "Altered consciousness." Perfect.

Zoldipem is highly psychoactive, approaching states of mind that could be considered psychedelic. The waking state becomes hazy and drowsy, the body becomes heavy as gravity pulls you to the ground, or the nearest bed. Objects begin swirling in your vision. Patterns begin to develop and move within objects, the walls start breathing and undulating in front of your eyes. Distances and time are distorted. You don't have too much time to enjoy this, as before long you collapse and dash off into sleep.

After swallowing the pill, I held out for as long as possible. I didn't resist the urge to sleep--I allowed the initial wanderings of sleep to wash over me--but I didn't completely allow it to sweep me away.

With the lights out and my eyes closed, I tried to observe the onset of the sleep state. The Zoldipem was creating patterns on my eyelids similar to those of LSD or psilosibin. These are clearly waking, conscious patterns that evolve in the very forefront of consciousness. They have very little to do with the subconscious. I noticed this when the actual dream images began surfacing from somewhere else, somewhere in the back or bottom of my brain. Somewhere deep, deep in the middle. Faces or bodies would appear almost as if they were just regular thoughts. If a regular thought is a 2 dimensional, black and white image, a dream thought is that same image in 3-D and technicolor. But this time the image moves and develops, wandering seamlessly through the mind as if you were actually watching it on TV. And just before you dash off into sleep, the image flowers and comes to life, scenery develops around it. Noises and voices become clear. A whole scene may play out in front of you. And then--zonk.

I fell asleep somewhere as the scene was unfolding. I don't remember what I dreamed about.

More experimentation is necessary.