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Comment by vjerancrnjak | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, all of the descriptions can be experienced as you fall asleep. If you can pay good attention, you can experience paralysis consciously when it starts. You will even experience twitching and you will see it has nothing to do with visual dreaming.

You can also experience the shift of this balance center mentioned in the article, feeling as if you’re turning or falling. If you can persist the attention, even though this shifting feels very scary, you will have a feeling as if your face is squished against the pillow and not the back of your head.

The body feels the closest when it is paralyzed, you feel an expansion of your experience, not a reduction.

The name for this is conscious sleep (yoga nidra) and there’s some research on it.

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> you will have a feeling as if your face is squished against the pillow

That’s an excellent description. I watch myself fall asleep occasionally and this is indeed the case. Sometimes it’s like I’m flattened entirely or squeezed into a point. Strangely it feels expansive instead of restrictive.

To be a bit more precise, to me it feels like a point that’s behind my face just rotates to the back, almost as if it is rolling in a jar affected by gravity.

The end state then feels closer to the pillow and I guess because the point was closer to the face it feels like face is squished.

I wish I could do that. If I am paying attention I wont fall asleep.

It is a very subtle skill. It's not paying attention with the intensity of e.g. playing a game. It's more like barely observing what's going on in front of your mind's eye, barely floating above the water without sinking into oblivion.

You get better at it with practice. Not that I'm an expert, but it is an interesting experience.

This is correct. I experience hypnogogic and -pompic hallucinations, and the same technique works to experience them more vividly and for extended periods of time.

It depends on where your brain creates the anchor. For me it is very close to visual thoughts so I can very easily feel when the attention moves to a place where you can relax to paralysis.

Thoughts are just thought beginnings where the attention creates this illusion of a continuous thought. So when attention is moved you will see hundreds of thoughts arising, seemingly random, all over the place, almost as if you’re dreaming, but the attention can be moved to avoid this pointless loop of random thought observing.

Attention starts with feeling the distance from the observation point created by the brain to your body parts. Then this attention needs to eventually make the feeling of your body very close which for me results in a paralysis. But the whole process does not feel like I’m guiding it. It’s like the attention mechanism of the brain finds a place from which it can consciously sleep. There is no effort at all.

> So when attention is moved you will see hundreds of thoughts arising, seemingly random, all over the place, almost as if you’re dreaming, but the attention can be moved to avoid this pointless loop of random thought observing.

Can you expand substantially on what you're saying here? It seems utterly foreign to me...do you experience them all at once, or one at a time in a series???

I might be delusional. I do think that observing the balance center moving is possible, many people sometimes almost fall asleep but wake up because they feel they are falling or falling off the bed. Paralysis is also experienced.

But the way I pay attention to thoughts might be different from you. Neurodivergent people might experience noise where their thoughts are, some might think but have intrusive thoughts, some like me can have a strong sense of choosing the thought stream, thinking clearly through problems without any intrusion.

So when I move away from a single thought stream and brush over all thought beginnings I might be hallucinating the facts that I read about thinking. The brain never stops thinking, it always produces hundreds of thoughts, that’s energy efficient. What happens to me is that I quickly glance over most thought beginnings, sometimes shocked by what is starting, feeling it is completely unrelated. I sometimes fall away and focus on a particular thought (which then starts a coherent thought stream) and then need to start being attentive again to move away.

I never observed hundreds of parallel thought streams, only thought beginnings that are just vague visual and verbal starts on which you can focus and observe the coherent stream. But maybe that’s an illusion and the thoughts are fully formed but it is only my attention not being able to see it fully once it moves away. Brain is weird and not even the user understands it.

I do not know if I’m just dreaming that up or if it is just how it is.

When I move away further and pay attention to body signals that’s the place from which I can experience conscious sleep. But it is very weird sensation as there is no effort or control over that process. It is just very relaxed dreamy attention.

Your experiences during "conscious sleep" almost exactly match many phenomenon described by meditators and that of ego/mind death as described by UG Krishnamurti. On the experience of "being flattened":

>“When I lie down and close my eyes, the outside world completely disappears, and there is only the awareness of what is happening inside, the lub-dub of the heart. The whole human being is reduced to just this awareness of the heartbeat (laughs), and then suddenly even that is gone. I don’t want to use the word ‘samadhi’. Every time it happens, it happens in a different way. And then sometimes there is a flash of light and everything is gone, it is totally blank; perhaps that is pure consciousness. This is not a vision. You know I am very sceptical. But I can’t compare this with anything. And I don’t rush out to refer to some book to find out what it could be. I’ll have to discover it myself and this is a moment-to-moment business.”

>“This is perhaps called samadhi, going into samadhi. Say you are lying down on the bed and because there is nothing else to do, you watch your body. Actually you are not aware of your total body when you lie down, only those spots of the body that touch the bed. And when this happens, after a while, all of a sudden some kind of a searchlight is thrown on this point (head?)—this is some kind of awareness, not a vision—this is like a searchlight from the top like you find at airports, and it moves from one point to another, slowly, back and forth”

>“Yesterday, I was lying on the bed and the body disappeared. There was awareness of only the head. (This was unrelated to the previous state, yet a similar one. But how it comes into being every time is different). And then all of a sudden the awareness disappeared from my head and there was only the bed. When you are in this state, you can’t do anything. But, later, I was narrating this to Valentine. It is like the Mickey Mouse story—what you see in the Tom & Jerry cartoon film. Something hard and heavy falls on the cat and the cat becomes flat... When I woke up, I thought, ‘What is this? My body is so flat!’ At the time you can’t do anything, only later the mind comes in and tries to understand but it cannot—it can only speculate, imagine, which shows that the trace of the mind is still there. It comes but gets no answer.”

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