Liminal Dreaming

There’s a swirling, kaleidoscopic, free-associative experience on the edge of your mind. You’ll find it in the space right between awake and asleep, where your meandering consciousness mixes memory and thought with visionary imagery. I call this experience liminal dreaming. 'Liminal' refers to the spaces in between things, the transitional condition of thresholds or boundaries. There are two dream states that, together, make up liminal dreaming: hypnagogia and hypnopompia. These constantly morphing states cling to the edges of sleep. You’re probably familiar with both, but you may never have given them much thought. Liminal dreams happen during flux periods in the nervous system, when brain waves jump around from one settled state (Alpha, Theta, REM) to another as we fall asleep or wake up. Betwixt settled states lies the liminal dream. Although generally the shortest lasting mind states, hypnagogia and hypnopompia contain more than twice as many brainwave forms than any other state, waking or sleeping. The chaotic, shifting patterns of liminal dream states reflect the experience, faces seen as we slip into sleep (hypnagogia), the thoughts that drift across the border into dream and back again while you slowly wake (hypnopompia), involuntary jolts of the body (called myclonic jerks), remarkably realistic and uncanny auditory experiences, and the bizarre thrills of sleep paralysis when your still-waking mind realizes it’s in a paralyzed and dreaming body.

Hypnagogia and hypnopompia provide some of the strangest, loveliest, and most interesting dreams. They’re quite unlike what you experience during REM (rapid eye movement), the phase of dreaming you’ve probably heard of. Most people know that dreams happen during REM, but not many understand that dreams happen in other phases of sleep as well.

My interest in liminal dreaming arises from my own incredible explorations of these spaces. Over my fifteen years of working seriously with dreams, I discovered an ability to dream while still physically awake. In this edge realm between conscious and unconscious, there’s the possibility of encountering our own visionary mind without the heavy hand of the ordinary ego, but also without simply reacting to whatever unusual things happen in the fully dreaming world.

Liminal dreaming is about exploring this crepuscular space, and it is a practice that can be cultivated. Much like lucid dreaming (but considerably easier to learn), liminal dreaming has a rich history. From Tibetan Buddhists to Salvador Dalí to August Kekulé (who discovered the benzene ring in hypnagogic dream), liminal dream practices have been developed and used across time and cultures.

If you’re interested in pursuing extraordinary states of mind, experimenting with your own wondrous consciousness, please give liminal dreaming a try.

Jennifer Dumpert is a San Francisco-based writer and lecturer, and the founder of the Oneironauticum, an international organization that explores the phenomenological experience of dreams as a means of experimenting with mind. She also teaches the practice of Liminal Dreaming — surfing the edges of consciousness using hypnagogic and hypnopompic dream states. Jennifer has lectured and led workshops at festivals, conferences, and venues such as Summit at Sea, Lightning in a Bottle, Symbiosis, the Women’s Visionary Congress, Esalen Institute, Ojai Institute, Psymposia, and Priceless.

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