Week 5: The threshold with no witness

Why falling asleep is the hardest state in the course to study, and what hypnagogia tells us anyway

22 March 2027

Every experience in this course has one instrument available to study it: whatever is doing the noticing. Falling asleep is the case where that instrument switches off partway through, which is exactly why the hypnagogic state — the drifting, logic-loosened stretch right before sleep — has been so hard to pin down scientifically, and so persistently interesting to artists and researchers who study it anyway.

Outline#

• hypnagogia: what’s actually been measured (EEG changes, hallucinatory imagery, loosened association) versus what’s introspectively reported
• why the last thing you remember is not the same as the last thing that happened
• what it means that the most reliable data point most people have is “I don’t remember losing the thread” rather than a described boundary