Incredible pre-sleep thoughts and revelations

[Polytrix]

Bit of an odd topic but could lead to some interesting conversation. I'm probably leaving myself open to trolling here but that's funny too so whatever :P

 

I think it's related to what's going on chemically in your brain before you fall into a deep slumber but I've recently found an incredible sense of clarity and realisation about things just before I fall asleep. It's often related to my goals and dreams or simply about living well.

 

It's a shame I can't document these fleeting thoughts of inspiration, realisation or wonderment. You get them for a split second and then bang they are gone.

 

My Dad for instance solves really complex maths related stuff in his dreams related to his work which is kind of incredible right! It seems we are at our most ingenious when we are fully switched off from outside interference. Mad how we know so little about the brain and how to optimise human intelligence.

 

Ever experienced the same? Care to share what you thought of?

 

 

[Ragnar]

i EQ in my dreams

[Polytrix]

don't forget to high pass those dreams :P

[Dale]

I have strange moments before I drift off to sleep where I think of the nature of reality, death, the universe etc. in a very deep way

It's quite fun, but sometimes it can be daunting. And this happens only when I'm about to go to sleep.

[Perezvon]

I always have the most incredible tracks in my mind in pre-sleep, but when I snap out of it and get my guitar or even try to turn the computer on there's just no way to even reproduce the timbre of my dream

[th555]

yea

[Polytrix]

Oh good well I'm happy it's not just me. Think it's human right. Melodies come to me very easily before sleep but they are dead as soon as I try and give birth to them.

 

 

I have strange moments before I drift off to sleep where I think of the nature of reality, death, the universe etc. in a very deep way

It's quite fun, but sometimes it can be daunting. And this happens only when I'm about to go to sleep.

 

EXACTLY what happens to me. It's kind of euphoric right?

[Soloman Tump]

I always have the most incredible tracks in my mind in pre-sleep, but when I snap out of it and get my guitar or even try to turn the computer on there's just no way to even reproduce the timbre of my dream

 

Last Step - Sleep

[Verdant Hickies]

Yea there's this very specific short moment when I'm on the edge between sleep and awakeness where I have the strangest thoughts and feelings.

Actually sort of similar to how friends described their DMT-experience. I feel in contact with feelings that seem completely out of this world but also familiar,

as if I had been in contact with them during birth or as a small child.

In this dream-phase I also get the most interesting artistic ideas, but am usually too lazy to write them down or draw them.

Sometimes I also think of melodies, but the moment I realize I'm thinking up a melody I wake up and forget how it went.

[KovalainenFanBoy]

the only thing I feel pre-sleep is regret over another wasted day

[Polytrix]

We should make more effort to record this stuff down before we sleep basically

[t yst r]

Indeed the best time to reflect about all the ideas I have going 'round in my head. It's rare, but when it happens it's all on auto-pilot. For instance, when I think of architecture -specifically art nouveau, as you can tell from my avatar- it can create itself. I initiate a thought and my brain fills in the rest, as if I've seen it in real life. Wish I could record those things... I guess you can be really great at what you do when you can actually reconstruct those thoughts.

[caze]

I've suffered from insomnia on and off for most of my life, my mind is often racing when I'm trying to go asleep, only usually tired when I don't want or need to not be. Think about all kinds of things, often profoundish philosophical scientific nonsense, but I also often solve annoying programming problems from work just before I fall asleep, or while I'm asleep and realise them just as I wake up.

[Amen Lare]

the only thing I feel pre-sleep is regret over another wasted day

 

Basically this, i have to fantasize about meeting hot women (the only working opiate, funnily with no resolution as i'm stuck within a loop) in order to stop the ever-frustrating flow of chaotically re-thinking every small bit of routine. I don't want to resort to sleeping pills, but my favourite days are probably those when i'm exhausted enough to instantly fall asleep.

[Polytrix]

Shit peeps got sleep problems too right! Dang this thread got personal.

 

Every day doesn't have to be your best right...I think you can find beauty in the smallest parts of your day if you look for it.

 

If you've made someone else smile for a split second then you've had a great day..ain't no waste in that.

[sweepstakes]

I was making a concerted effort to recall my dreams for a couple weeks and I found that this also enhanced my ability to remember some of these thoughts with a fair amount of clarity.

 

Unfortunately music hasn't been entangled in these thoughts for a while, it's mostly programming thoughts for me too.

 

When I was in college I would get music ideas at all times of the night; at any point when I woke up (whether it was as drifting off, interrupted in the middle of the night, or in early morning dreams) there was a good chance that I would have some musical passage at the front of my mind. Usually they were pretty simple but mysterious. I managed to record a few of them with decent success - usually the timbres were way off but a couple times I got the melody a good 70-90% right. These were usually traveled with fairly intense dreams.

 

A couple of the "ones that got away" that I still vaguely remember:

 

 

One time I had this dream that I was on these train tracks in the middle of the woods on a painfully bright summer day, and I sensed that a train was coming down the tracks but it was actually God and I could hear his sound (voice isn't the right word). It sounded like the a horrifying choir of thousands, maybe millions, all in tuned with harmonics. It was like an infinitely huge aggregate of voices all emanating from the same mind. But it also seemed almost synthetic, too geometric for nature. The sound was like an intense white light coming down the train tracks. I was pretty awestruck by this sound and I had no confidence in my ability to reproduce it. For some reason, thinking about it now, I feel like the DLGranulator in Audiomulch would have been the best hope at making an attempt, it has given me that same sensation of bright light, especially with a lot of feedback and the pitchshifting tuned near a perfect fifth.

 

I had another dream that I think this transitioned to with this greenhouse annex to a remote, luxurious but abandoned and run-down mansion with broken glass and vines running through the windows and the most beautiful acoustic guitar passage was playing, reverberating off the walls. But I couldn't remember the music clearly enough and I'm no guitarist. When I woke up the last thought I remember was a color that's simultaneously a deep brown and a deep blue. This was after watching Soderbergh's Solaris and heard Nick Drake for the first time and I think that intense feeling of loss carried into my dreams.

 

 

[sweepstakes]

Also, many of the melodies I made in my sleep and tried to recreate either got lost in translation or didn't make sense when I woke up, but when I sliced them up in a sampler and played with the slices, they led to interesting places. I think there is something interesting here to be said about losing control but keeping the rest of the creative facilities active, something Cage probably already expressed, that's as applicable (or nearly as applicable) to programming or anything else as it is to music.

[doublename]

I wish I could recall some these weird thoughts, but they seem to evaporate as soon as I become aware of them.

[luke viia]

mostly dank memes tbh

[goDel]

I often have my problem solving state at the end of my sleep. Before my sleep I'm just tired, but I used to be full of thoughts all the time. Too full, and the only thing which helped me there was journaling. Write away all the stupid shit. It's the only way to let things go. And it seems to create room for that problem solving stage as well.

[Silent Member]

I always have the most incredible tracks in my mind in pre-sleep, but when I snap out of it and get my guitar or even try to turn the computer on there's just no way to even reproduce the timbre of my dream

Pretty much this, going to sleep is almost always preceded by the fading in of a lush composition I'm unable to grasp when awake. So frustrating, I'm obviously capable somewhere deep below.

[YEK]

i get the pre-sleep ideas mostly when i'm taking naps. like the mood is, i'm not really that tired, but i just want to rest anyways,

[digit]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

[caze]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

 

I often have hypnagogic phosphene hallucinations, occasionally they morph into faces and things (very quickly changing before they fade away completely, attempting to concentrate on them just makes them morph quicker) but they're usually pretty abstract. Apparently some people have pretty vivid and lifelike hypnagogic hallucinations though, Oliver Sacks goes into it in his fantastic Hallucinations book. I've also woken up to sleep paralysis on a couple of occasions, but only lasted a couple of seconds thankfully.

[joshuatxuk]

I often get back memories and thoughts randomly that I had long forgotten when drifting off to sleep.

 

It should noted a lot of very creative/inventive people exploited this sensation through their sleeping habits. Edison specifically napped only, 3-4 hours bursts at most, in order to get in this state more often. August Kekulé's biggest scientific breakthrough came via a half-dream.

 

 

 

The ouroboros, Kekulė's inspiration for the structure of benzene.

The new understanding of benzene, and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé's honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper. Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory. He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).[10] This vision, he said, came to him after years of studying the nature of carbon-carbon bonds.

 

A similar humorous depiction of benzene had appeared in 1886 in the Berichte der Durstigen Chemischen Gesellschaft (Journal of the Thirsty Chemical Society), a parody of the Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft, only the parody had monkeys seizing each other in a circle, rather than snakes as in Kekulé's anecdote.[11] Some historians have suggested that the parody was a lampoon of the snake anecdote, possibly already well-known through oral transmission even if it had not yet appeared in print.[12] Others have speculated that Kekulé's story in 1890 was a re-parody of the monkey spoof, and was a mere invention rather than a recollection of an event in his life. Kekulé's 1890 speech,[13] in which these anecdotes appeared, has been translated into English.[14] If one takes the anecdote as the memory of a real event, circumstances mentioned in the story suggest that it must have happened early in 1862.[15]

 

He told yet another anecdote in 1890, of a vision of dancing atoms and molecules that led to his theory of structure. This happened, he claimed, while he was riding on the upper deck of a horse-drawn omnibus in London. This probably occurred in the late summer of 1855.[16]