HYPNOGOGIA

Hypnogogics act as a seed for the dream to come as we are falling asleep. For the majority of people, they are visual in nature. Less common are auditory hallucinations, and the rarest are tactile hallucination where you may feel things. People tend to fall into one category or the other, and this is more an indication of how your mind works. For the sake of discussion, we will focus on the most common visual aspects.

Let's say you have a glass full of water. The water represents the totality of your attention, and the glass represents the waking world. We also have an empty glass, which represents the dream world. We begin with all our attention in the "waking" container, and as we fall asleep, we gradually begin removing awareness from the waking world, freeing it up to construct our dream world.

These simple visuals (or whatever) grow and expand as we transfer awareness from the waking world into our dream scape. The more we transfer, the more complex this visual becomes. It continues to grow in complexity until we reach a tipping point where we have more attention invested into the dream world than we do the waking one. This tipping point is is marked by the acquisition of the dream body.

Occasionally, we skip this hypnogogic seed stage. Instead of a gradual transfer of awareness, there is a sudden dump. This sudden dump also produces the sudden appearance of the dream body, which requires a dream to move around in. Since there is no hypnagogic seed to sprout into a dream, the dream defaults to the last thing you were aware of, which is being in bed in your room. With your room as a seed, the resulting dream will be of your room or house. This creates an OBE scenario.