Jennifer Dumpert (LinkedIn | Twitter) is all for you going after your dreams. Literally. She’s an author and speaker that specializes in dreams –particularly liminal dreaming– and she thinks that figuring out what your dreams are trying to tell you can be a powerful thing. Her most recent book, “Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep” is now available, and she stopped by The Mission Daily to talk to us about liminal dreaming: what it is, what it means, and how it can be used to improve your mental health.
What is liminal dreaming? “Liminal Dreaming, which is the space between awake and asleep, hypnagogia, when you’re falling asleep, and hypnopompia when you’re waking up. So, liminal dream states are some of the most unusual dream states. I’ve had a lot of background working with dreams, lucid dreams and oneirogens, things that promote vivid dreams, different kinds of dream work. And a few years ago I started getting really involved in liminal dreams. It started with an experience where I was lying in bed and I realized that basically my body had fallen asleep. And my mind was still awake and I was having this dream and it had a little bit of narrative, but it’s kind of non-narrative. And that experience got me really interested and I started exploring a little bit and realize that hypnagogia and hypnopompia, they’re experiences that everyone has, we all go through them and they’re super weird.”
It all depends on brain waves: “Most brainwave states and measured by EEG, are marked by one single sign wave. So right now we’re probably in beta. We’re going like eight, probably like eight to 13 waves per second because we’re engaged in the conversation. Feta, which is most usually has two sign waves, most have one. But hypnagogia and hypnopompia have nine sign waves. And so it’s by far the shortest brainwave period. And most of us, unless you train yourself to stay in it, you only spend minutes a day. If you think of subconscious and dream and sleep as the ocean, and you think of the waking rational mind as the land, the place where water crashes into land is super chaotic. That’s where all the waves are. And that’s where you surf. So liminal dreaming is kind of surfing the edge of conscious and unconscious. It’s learning to surf the space where you’re both dreaming and awake at the same time and kind of surf down the middle of them.”
You can do it. Everyone can find that sweet spot: it just takes some practice. “So, when you’re sleepy, lie down on the couch, in your bed, wherever it is, when you’re sleepy, and breathe really deeply. Exhale. And as you exhale, exhale out all of your waking energy and any tension that’s in your body. And soften your mind. Exhale your daily mind, your thought processes and wait for whatever shows up. And it might be a little visual glimmer, might be points of light. It might be a sound. It might even just be something that you’re imagining, like you’re realizing that your thought is just starting to drift a little bit like you’re daydreaming. And then let that come into your consciousness. Exhale again, exhale your waking energy out. Exhale any mental wordings that you have, and let that animate the beginning of the hypnagogic dream and let there be a feedback loop. Keep breathing deeply and slowing down your own mind and body, loosening your mental grip and letting all of the energy that you’re exhaling bring to life this hypnagogic dream. And then you’ll just start to slide into the hypnagogic dream space. It’s really a balance between not falling asleep, giving yourself enough mental juice to stay in the space, but not waking up. And then learning to find that line. And it might be easier to find when you’re falling asleep at night. And then once you’ve learned to find it, you could always find it.”
What are some applications? There are several practical applications for this kind of dreaming
“At MIT, there’s a suite of products, one of which is called Dormio. And Dormio is basically using technology toward the same end to use hypnagogia to mine it. It’s been a space that scientists and thinkers and philosophers have used for problem solving and creativity for a very long time. So Dormio is basically trying to harness hypnagogia space using technology so that it can actually record what’s happening in hypnagogic space toward these ends.”
To listen to the whole interview, check out our podcast here.
