Hypnagogia
Hypnagogia is the drowsy transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, in which spontaneous visual, auditory and bodily imagery, unusual thought and speech, heightened suggestibility, and symbolic representations of ongoing mental and physical processes are reported without the sleeper having yet lost waking consciousness. Its mirror-image state at the other end of sleep, in which the same kind of imagery occurs while waking rather than falling asleep, is hypnopompic. The two states are invoked, in this corpus's own sources, on opposite sides of a single dispute: as the mundane explanation psychiatry offers for a reported non-human intelligent being encounter, and — by at least one contactee — as the explanation his own contact is held to specifically NOT be.
Origin of the terms
"Hypnagogic," from the Greek hypnos ("sleep") and agōgos ("conductor" or "leader"), was coined by the French scholar Alfred Maury in 1848; "hypnopompic," built on the Greek pompos ("sender"), was coined more than half a century later, in 1904, by the psychical researcher Frederic Myers to name the corresponding phenomena at sleep-offset rather than sleep-onset. A hypnagogic state is not itself classified, in the sleep-research literature, as lucid dreaming: the imagery is passively observed rather than actively navigated, which distinguishes it from a dream proper even where the content is dream-like. Sleep paralysis can accompany a hypnagogic or hypnopompic episode but is a distinct phenomenon in its own right, requiring the intrusion of REM sleep muscular atonia into the waking state rather than merely the drowsy imagery hypnagogia names on its own.
Invoked as a mundane account of contact
Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda name "sleep paralysis or hypnagogic hallucinations" among the psychiatric explanations offered for the alien-abduction experience, and argue that treating every such report as an instance of the hypnagogic state is itself a mark of observer bias rather than a demonstrated finding.
The remote-viewer and Farsight Institute founder Courtney Brown draws the same contrast from the contactee's side, explicitly distinguishing his own reported decades-long relationship with a group of extraterrestrials from anything recovered from a half-asleep state: "none of these things are things I had to remember in a hypnagogic state, half asleep or something. We've just been dealing with these ETs for a long time." Brown's contacts are described, on his account, as recurring physical meetings at fixed locations rather than a solitary drowsy-state perception, which he offers as the reason the hypnagogic account does not apply to his case even though it might, in his own framing, apply to others'.
Open questions
References
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