What is the state between sleep and wakefulness called? Wakefulness and sleep How to catch the gap between sleep and wakefulness.

Recently I have come to the conviction that of all the modern and non-modern “parapsychological” practices known to me, the most productive is working with the condition. No bat wings, no :-) Even Sufi whirling is, with this approach, only a means, not an end.

And one of the most interesting and practically useful states that I have “tried” over the past six months is sliding between sleep and reality.

This is a state when you didn’t fall asleep very much, or didn’t wake up very much :-). In my case, for some reason it works easier when waking up than when falling into sleep. Metaphorically, this can be expressed in the image of an iceberg:

The picture is simple - let’s imagine all the knowledge available to a person as a single iceberg, of which consciousness is a small but open part; and the subconscious is large, but hidden. By fixing most of our attention on consciousness, we are in reality; fixing most of the attention on the subconscious - in a dream. The transition to a state of sliding is a fixation of attention on a narrow strip between sleep and reality.

It’s like in that song: “I couldn’t sleep enough, but in my dream I saw it.” Yes.

The advantages of being in this state:

1. Greater integrity, unity of one’s personality. “Sliding”, you get pleasure from being.

2. The ability to obtain direct, most relevant knowledge at the moment. For example, the first time I entered the "slip" I was visiting a friend. An Internet video was played in which an American man in his 30s spoke fluently about wrestling in English. I’ll say right away that my English is good, but far from excellent, especially in terms of speaking - so I didn’t really understand what he was saying. And wrestling didn’t really interest me. “Sliding”, I not only understood every word of his - without translating, with all the intonations and phraseological units, I was also imbued with his state, empathized with him. The second time in “sliding” he gave me the true name of the person nearby. Upon awakening, having told about this, I received confirmation: the man had dreamed of this name since childhood, and his mother should have called him that if his grandmother had not intervened.

I don’t use special methods to transition into sliding, but Salvador Dali used similar states. And he used the following method to enter, which he called “sleeping with a key in his hand”: he sat in a comfortable chair with armrests, put a metal key in one (relaxed!) hand - so that when he fell asleep and finally relaxed, the key fell to the floor and woke him up. Attention did not have time to sink deeply into sleep, and the artist could remember a couple of images from the dream upon awakening.

7-8 years ago I practiced this method, however, without much success - either a falling key (spoon/fork/anything metal and not very heavy) hit the floor so quietly that I did not wake up; or, when I placed a metal basin at hand, the sound was so deafening that the image of the dream could be lost due to fright. But, in any case, this practice gave a certain effect - who knows: if I had not done it then, would I now be able to transfer consciousness into a sliding state by force of will.

Try it - maybe you will succeed. But remember, the main thing is internal effort, practice is only a means.

Lately I have often heard expressions such as "lucid dream", “controlling reality through dreams” and so on. Everyone can roughly imagine what it is. In the morning, usually coming out of a state of sleep for a split second and falling into a state of wakefulness, we hang somewhere in between))) I have repeatedly caught myself in this amazing intermediate state, when you can seem to control your dreams: by thinking out the plot, end up where you want and with whomever you want ) In a word, you become the director of your dream) But is it a dream?))) Or is it already some kind of projection onto reality??)) And can we ourselves control the immersion in this intermediate state?)
Of course!)) Anything is possible!) We only invent the impossible for ourselves so as not to do anything)))))) So one of the ways of conscious “immersion” is the practice of yoga nidra.

Yoga Nidra is the twilight state of mind between wakefulness and sleep.
What bonuses??
With the help of regular practice, you can achieve previously inaccessible results in the development of human abilities - intellectual, creative, spiritual, in calming the mind, increasing vital energy, healing, curing diseases, etc. With the help of yoga nidra, the body self-heals. Due to complete relaxation of the body and mind yoga nidra rejuvenates and revitalizes the physical, mental and emotional aspects of the personality. One hour of yoga nidra is equal to three to four hours of full-fledged deep sleep.

Who should practice?
The practice of yoga nidra is especially recommended for those people who suffer from fear, tension, obsessive thoughts and other disharmonies. It is indicated for those who want to develop greater awareness and purity of thoughts.

What's the point??
Yoga Nidra is a powerful technique of conscious relaxation that has nothing to do with falling asleep. Such relaxation cannot be compared with the so-called “rest”, when we sit comfortably in a chair, armed with a cup of coffee, a drink, a cigarette and a newspaper in front of the TV. It is more of a sensual entertainment than a relaxation (or unwinding) experience. Yoga Nidra, in turn, is a lucid dream, a special systematic method of complete physical, mental and emotional relaxation. The term "yoga nidra" consists of two words: "yoga" - union, unity (or one-pointed consciousness) and "nidra" - dream. Outwardly, from the outside, it may seem that a person practicing yoga nidra is simply falling into sleep, while in reality his consciousness continues to function, penetrating into the subconscious. This is why yoga nidra is often called psychic sleep, deep relaxation with inner awareness, when spontaneous contact with the sphere of the subconscious and unconscious. Yoga nidra leads to a state of relaxation due to the distraction of consciousness from external impressions and its immersion in the innermost depths of the psyche. If consciousness separate How from external perception, so from sleep, it is filled with power that can be used for various purposes, such as: strengthening memory, accumulating knowledge, increasing creativity, transforming the entire personality.

How to achieve?
Yoga Nidra brings consciousness to the borderline state between sleep and wakefulness and is performed while lying on your back in a pose called shavasana yoga. Three states of consciousness are generally known: wakefulness, dreaming sleep and deep dreamless sleep. Yoga nidra allows you to achieve and remain for a long time in the fourth state of consciousness - intermediate - between sleep and wakefulness. This state of superconsciousness is called turiya. In yoga nidra, the body sleeps and the consciousness is awake. It allows you to release and dissolve "blocks and tensions hidden deep in the subconscious and creating obstacles for us in realizing our goals. This is achieved through several techniques - "rotation" of consciousness across different parts of the body in a certain sequence; breathing monitoring in different parts of the body and counting inhalations and exhalations in reverse; evoking “bodily” memories of different sensations; visualization, built on the use of image-symbols that direct consciousness to a state of harmony and meditation. When the body is completely relaxed, the mind also becomes relaxed, and its activity is maintained by moving consciousness around the body, noticing the breath, experiencing various sensations, creating mental images.

How long?
The duration of a yoga nidra session is 30-40 minutes.(source: www.kazanyoga.info/travels/yoga_nidra/)

Picture of brain activity during yoga nidra( university research in Copenhagen):www.yogin.ru/parser.php

If you can't sleep for a long time or have nightmares...
No matter what the Copenhagen studies say, we trust our own experience, the experience of our loved ones and friends. My friend, who practices like me, now takes shavasana every time before going to bed (lying on her back, arms along her body, palms up) and begins to meditate, imagining that with every breath all the cells of her body are filled with oxygen and hundreds of buds of beautiful flowers bloom in body After such meditations, she quickly falls asleep and has sweet dreams. One day, after a hard day, she fell asleep without meditating. So what do you think?? She had nightmares and woke up broken in the morning.
As far as I understand from a few years of life experience, our brain needs a mood, like a musical instrument. If he's upset. the tonality is broken, the sound is disgusting. Therefore, it is necessary to tune not only musical instruments, equipment and other equipment around you, but also your brain, consciousness, body, soul)

There are still a lot of teachings on managing dreams, and no matter what we study, the main thing is to understand: why do we need this)

Sweet dreams and positive attitude!)

What does a person see and feel between sleep and reality? For decades, psychologists, hypnologists and neurocybernetics have been struggling with these mysteries. The questions did not arise out of nowhere: there are precedents when mentally healthy people on the verge of falling asleep observed anomalous visions that subsequently left quite material traces in our world.

We know that the human brain works all the time, whether we are sleeping or awake, it generates and emits a certain type of waves. Encephalographs connected to the cerebral cortex impartially record electroencephalograms that reflect the activity of one or another activity of our thinking center. By the type of oscillations of alpha, beta, delta or theta waves, you can always determine which organ or system is active in the body. If we digest food, the brain prefers the alpha wave. If we write poetry, or paint a picture, or invent, then theta waves appear on the scene. They are responsible for a person’s creative streak.

When the brain pulsates in the borderline state of consciousness between sleep and reality, it is difficult to decipher this chaos of vibrations. There is nothing to compare with, there are no original sample diagrams, there are no adequate descriptions of the “correctness” of brain function. In this state, a person can see, hear, taste, touch. He is unable to separate the hallucination from the real picture. The illusory picture of the world and material reality in the internal neurocybernetic space of the brain are mixed in the most bizarre way and present to the mind a new pattern between the worlds of sleep and reality. Medicine says this is how testing long-term and short-term memory works. Information is sorted: rarely used information is discarded and remains in short-term memory, while unnecessary information is blocked, and we forget some episode; on the contrary, what is frequently used is rewritten into a long-term “brain storage”.

But we don’t believe that during the falling asleep phase, the brain, like a ragpicker, does nothing but sort through all sorts of informational rubbish. Psychologists believe that the main command post of our central nervous system before sleep controls the processes of inhibition and wakefulness and looks for the shortest path to optimizing the state of the psyche between stress and comfort. Hypnologists still cannot give an exact definition of the state of hypnotic sleep (not to be confused with normal sleep) and deep trance. Neurosurgeons joke: during craniotomy, no mind, no intelligence, no consciousness, no soul is visible, and only the cerebral convolutions, requiring glucose and oxygen, appear to the eye.

Some sensitive people who engage in introspection and self-immersion in trance argue that the borderline state of consciousness allows a person to see the world more integral and rich than ordinary materiality. Are they lying to themselves or others? Can these visions be completely attributed to hallucinations or can we take into account one fact that is still indisputable. The Universe, its visible and observable part, is barely 4% studied today, but what about the remaining 96%?

Modern science at various macro and micro levels suggests that not everything is as simple in the real world as in classical Newtonian mechanics or in Minkowski space-time. It is not for nothing that over the past fifty years many physical models about the structure of the world have appeared, expanding the horizons of the universe. These are additional dimensions where quantum gravity with gravitons hides. These are parallel Universes with their own physical constants and their own flow of time. These are cosmic strings with zero thickness, where hosts of other worlds can hide. The crown of scientific thought is the Metaverse, in which myriads of different Universes float like in an aquarium.

We do not yet know for sure what the human brain is capable of, especially in stressful or other borderline states of consciousness. Is the human brain capable of perceiving information from the Metaverse or other Universes? It is possible that it is precisely between sleep and reality, in order to see other worlds, that the brain “misbehaves” and, like a street racer, presses the gas pedal, forcing a person to gain, as it were, additional information for reflection. What if we learn something useful? The notorious periodic table is “iron” proof of this.

Wakefulness and sleep are two physiological states of human activity, which are determined by the activity of certain centers of the brain, in particular, the hypothalamus and subthalamus, as well as the areas of the locus coeruleus and the raphe nucleus, located in the upper part of the brain stem. Both of these periods are cyclical in structure and are subject to the daily rhythms of the human body.

Rhythm of the internal clock

The mechanisms of wakefulness and sleep are still being studied and there are at least several theories about how our internal clock works. While in a state of wakefulness, we consciously react to any stimuli, fully aware of our connection with the outside world, our brain activity is in an active phase and almost all vital processes occurring in our body are aimed at absorbing and rationally wasting energy resources coming in from the outside in the form of water and food. In general, the psychophysiology of sleep and wakefulness is determined by the regulation of various systemic structures of the brain, which, in particular, contributes to the accumulation of information received when we are in a state of activity and its more detailed assimilation and distribution into departments during sleep.

Five stages of sleep

The sleep state is characterized by a lack of activity directed to the outside world and is conventionally divided into five stages, each of which lasts approximately 90 minutes.

1. The first two of these are the stages of light or light sleep, during which breathing and heart rate slow down, however, during this period we can wake up even from the slightest touch.
2. Then come the third and fourth phases of deep sleep, during which there is an even greater slowdown in the heart rate and a complete lack of reaction to external stimuli. Waking up a person who is in the stage of deep sleep is much more difficult.
3. The fifth and final stage of sleep is medically called REM (Rapid Eye Movement). At this stage of sleep, breathing and heartbeat quicken, the eyeballs move under closed eyelids, and all this happens under the influence of the dreams that a person sees. Experts in the field of somnology and neurology claim that absolutely everyone has dreams, but not all people remember them.

At the moment of falling asleep, as well as at the end of the deep sleep phase, we enter the so-called borderline state between sleep and wakefulness. During this period, the connection between consciousness and the environment reality is, in principle, present, but we do not fully associate ourselves with it.

Disturbances in sleep and wakefulness can be caused by various psychophysiological factors, such as uneven shift work schedules, time zone changes during air travel, etc. But the reasons for the disruption of the activity-rest rhythm can also lie in certain diseases, in particular, narcolepsy or hypersomnia . In any case, for any more or less pronounced disturbances in the cyclicity of states of wakefulness and sleep, it is advisable to consult a specialist.

Every night, when a person dreams, the brain completely turns off his ability to control his body, plunging the body into a state of paralysis so that dreams do not “break through” into reality, scientists believe, or maybe they turn us off in order to feed on our energy while we sleep. The author of the video was not afraid to install a camera and film the room while he was sleeping. True, now it’s not entirely clear how he will sleep at all after what the camera filmed.
Every night, when a person dreams, the brain completely turns off his ability to control his body, plunging the body into a state of paralysis so that dreams do not “break through” into reality, said Vladimir Kovalzon, a member of the board of the International Society of Somnologists, Doctor of Sciences.

The scientist recalled that sleep consists of two phases - the phase of slow sleep, and rapid or paradoxical sleep. It is during the last phase that a person dreams.

“These are two different states - slow-wave sleep and fast sleep. Two fundamentally different states, differing from each other no less than sleep from wakefulness,” the scientist said on the eve of World Sleep Day, which is celebrated on March 19 this year.

For the first time, two stages of sleep were discovered with the advent of electroencephalography, a method of recording electrical potentials in the brain. It turned out that the brain goes through several periods during sleep with different levels of activity, one of them - with relatively reduced activity - was called slow-wave sleep, the second, during which brain activity was almost the same as during wakefulness, was called fast sleep. phase.

Rapid or paradoxical sleep is characterized by the fact that a person's eyes move quickly, and the electroencephalogram becomes almost the same as that of a person who is awake.

The dream is three billion years old

For a long time, scientists could not say exactly why living organisms need sleep, in which they are defenseless against predators and other threats. You can restore strength simply by being at rest. Hypotheses have been put forward that during sleep the human body gets rid of toxins, and that during this period the functioning of the brain is restored. Experiments showed that animals deprived of sleep inevitably died.

Kovalzon says that the genes that are responsible for sleep appeared at the dawn of evolution, in the first microorganisms, about 3.5 billion years ago.

“These are genes associated with rhythms, with the biological clock. This is the most important mechanism; apparently, already in the first stages of evolution, it was needed to adapt to the fact that there is a change in darkness and light,” the scientist said.

According to him, attempts to fight sleep, to increase wakefulness through sleep, are “nonsense.”

“Our nature is different. Three states - wakefulness, fast and slow sleep - live inside us, and they must be realized. Fundamentally different states, three worlds that are inside us, we live this way, we are designed this way. You can’t do anything with it.” , - noted the agency's interlocutor.

The scientist said that the functions of slow sleep have now been established - at this time complex processes occur that ultimately lead to the restoration of special brain formations.

“There are some molecules that “shift” when awake; during sleep they restore their potential so that they can work again later. This is an absolutely necessary element of our life, without it neither we nor animals can exist,” Kovalzon said.

Why do you have dreams?

However, the functions of REM sleep are still not completely clear. Although it is known that early REM sleep plays a critical role in brain development, it is not clear why adults dream.

According to Kovalzon, an adult sleeps in REM sleep for no more than an hour and a half per night, but in a child this takes up to 90% of all sleep.

“It plays a crucial role; it has been shown that if experimental rats are deprived of REM sleep at an early age, the maturation of normal brain systems is disrupted - they cannot see normally, cannot feel normally, communicate. But why do adults need this? It’s still unclear,” the agency’s interlocutor said.

Nightly paralysis

Scientists were able to find out whether animals dream. Kovalzon said that in the brain there is a group of neurons that, during the REM sleep phase, turn off the muscles and paralyze the entire body.

“During REM sleep with dreams, we have an active blockade of the spinal cord. It sends powerful inhibitory impulses, blocks our entire body, we cannot move, we are in a state of paralysis. This is done so that we cannot realize what what we dream about,” the scientist explained.

If these paralyzing neurons are destroyed in a cat or rat, then one can personally observe the dreams of animals. “The cat is hunting for an invisible mouse, running from an invisible dog. From this it was concluded that they dream, but we don’t know what the situation is like for other animals,” the agency’s interlocutor said.

According to him, similar disorders in people who do not switch off the body during sleep can lead to tragic consequences. So, in the USA, an elderly husband strangled his wife in her sleep at night.

“He was brought to court, but somnologists gave him a tomogram and proved that he had a brain disorder; he did it involuntarily,” Kovalzon said.

So “sleep paralysis” saves people, the scientist believes.

Sleep paralysis astral

From time immemorial, the phenomenon of sleep paralysis has been shrouded in some mystery. He has been associated with various supernatural entities. In Rus', the most widespread belief is that the brownie comes at night to strangle. He jumps on the chest and strangles the person, so that he will let go, you must mentally ask him “for better or for worse?” There are also, in different countries, their own legends on this matter, that this is a witch who comes to drink the energy of a sleeping person, that this is a genie, in Basque mythology there is a special character - inguma, etc. In the modern world, one more option has been added to all these options: it is aliens who conduct their experiments at night by immobilizing a person.

With sleep paralysis, consciousness is in a borderline state between sleep and wakefulness. In this state, a person can not only feel the approach or presence of a certain entity, but also see and hear it.

How to induce sleep paralysis (enter sleep paralysis)

For most people, sleep paralysis scares the hell out of them. If it happens often, then the person begins to be afraid to fall asleep at night, remembers with horror his visions and auditory hallucinations, is afraid to go to bed one day and not wake up again. But, there are people who deliberately induce sleep paralysis. This is a borderline state of consciousness and can be used for various kinds of experiments with your subconscious or, as some argue, for leaving the body.

The easiest way is to slowly fall asleep. Try to grasp the boundary between when the body has already “turned off” and the consciousness is still awake. To track this state, it is necessary to switch thinking to superficial, preferably wordless, and observe auditory manifestations. As soon as you hear some extraneous sounds, rustling sounds, footsteps, it is most likely that the sleep phase has begun and the body has fallen into sleep paralysis.