Usually we pass through this state of half-wakefulness on our way to deep sleep within minutes. We may experience microdreams during the transition, but the content of these microdreams appear to be random and we usually don’t have any memory of them when we wake. A team of researchers led by MIT master's student Adam Horowitz wants to change that.

There is a borderland between waking life and the uncharted wilderness of sleep that we all traverse each night, but we rarely stop to marvel at the strangeness of this liminal world. If we do, we find that it is full of hallucinations both wonderful and terrifying, a mental goulash of reality and fantasy.

What is certain, however, is that hypnagogia is a natural phenomenon that almost all of us encounter on a nightly basis.

The technical name for the awareness of the brief period between wakefulness and sleep is hypnagogia , and its something of a mystery for neuroscientists. The reason for this is that determining when someone is actually asleep is a matter of debate among scientists. It’s kind of like trying to determine when someone is ‘actually’ dead: Is it when the heart stops beating, when they lose consciousness, or when cells finally stop replicating?

So far Horowitz has tested the device on 8 subjects and found that it is able to reliably maximize the amount of time users spend suspended between wakefulness and sleep, as well as shape the content of the microdreams they experience. In other words, these MIT researchers have developed a low cost device that allows users to interface with sleep.

Horowitz and his colleagues at the MIT Media Lab have developed a relatively simple device called Dormio to interface with this unique stage of sleep. Their hypothesis is that this liminal period between wakefulness and sleep is a fount of creativity that is usually lost in the ocean of sleep. The thinking is that if you’re able to descend into that stage of sleep and return to consciousness without descending deeper into sleep, you will benefit from the intensely associative thinking that characterizes the strange microdreams experienced during the transition to sleep.

“The big questions are whether we become more creative in this state of consciousness, and why in some cases hypnagogia leads to a full-fledged dreaming, whereas in other cases to dreamless sleep,” Noreika added.

“Hypnagogic imagery or hallucinations is a normal state of consciousness in the transition from wakefulness to sleep,” Valdas Noreika, a psychologist at Cambridge who was not involved with Dormio, told me in an email. Unlike other sleep states that allow for awareness, such as lucid dreaming during REM sleep, hypnagogia doesn’t require special training to induce its effects. It’s a common phenomenon that is a natural part of the circadian rhythm.

Defining just what hypnagogia is is tricky because people in this state exhibit behaviors characteristic of sleep and wakefulness, both from their own perspective and to outsiders. Technically speaking, hypnagogia occurs during stage 1 sleep, even if people who are woken up during this period sometimes report that they never were asleep or are able to respond when someone is talking to them. Moreover, people woken from hypnagogia often report strong visual and auditory hallucinations or microdreams, but like sleep itself, what counts as a ‘dream’ is a subject of debate among neuroscientists.

In any case, it’s hardly surprising that many of these same thinkers developed a life hack to induce hypnagogic consciousness at will to reap its creative benefits.

"I felt I was nowhere really, in this kind of nowhere space where all of these ideas exist."

The most famous example of purposely induced hypnagogia is probably Thomas Edison’s steel balls trick. According to possibly apocryphal tales, Edison was able to reliably induce hypnagogia by falling asleep with steel balls in his hand. As he drifted off to sleep, his muscles would relax and he would inevitably drop the balls on the floor and the noise from the fall would jolt him back to wakefulness. During these micronaps Edison would never fully fall asleep, but he would experience the strange hallucinations and insights characteristic of hypnagogia.

“All these major thinkers write beautifully about this state of mind where the world starts dissolving, but you still have awareness of your descent into unconsciousness and memories mixing with hallucinations,” Horowitz told me on the phone. “Hypnagogia is pretty damn cool, but the best way that anyone had come up with to find it was dropping a steel ball.”

Dormio, which is part of a wider MIT Media Lab initiative to interface with sleep, is essentially a 21st century take on Edison’s technique.

THE DREAM MACHINE

Dormio has now gone through two iterations, and Horowitz said he and his collaborators are now at work on a third. The first generation of Dormio consisted of an Arduino microcontroller mounted to a glove with a small pressure sensor in the palm that Horowitz designed with his colleagues Ishaan Grover, Sophia Yang and Pedro Reynolds Cuéllar.

A person dons the glove before going to sleep and clenches their hand into a fist, putting pressure on the sensor. At the same time electroencephalograph (EEG) sensors monitored electrical activity in the brain. As the hand and head sensors detect that the person’s muscles are relaxing and brain waves are changing as they fall asleep, it triggers a nearby Jibo robot to say a preprogrammed phrase. This phrase is meant to prime the sleeper’s brain so that it changed the content of the dream based on what the Jibo robot said.

Yet there were a number of problems with the device. For starters, EEG devices are expensive to use and it is quite complicated to understand the signals. Additionally, the palm sensors could only do two states—on or off—even though the onset of sleep occurs as a gradual transition.