Welcome to the Otherworld Patreon.
I'm your host, Jack Wagner.
In this bonus episode, I speak to Will Dowd.
He is an author and former MIT science writer
who recently spent a year experimenting with a device created by MIT called Dormio.
Dormio is an interactive, wearable system developed by the MIT Media Lab that tracks sleep onset to capture, influence,
and augment human creativity during hypnagogia.
Hypnagogia is the name for that state between sleep and wakefulness.
I'm sure everyone has some sort of experience with this state, even if you don't know the name for it.
Usually your brain is still active as that dreamy twilight feeling starts to take over.
Basically, the start of sleep.
And sometimes weird stuff can happen during that time.
This state can bring vivid geometric patterns, faces emerging from darkness, snippets of voices or music.
Sensations of falling or floating, and oftentimes that sudden jolt you feel right before you fall asleep.
Part of what makes it so mysterious is that the experiences feel neither like ordinary thought nor like true dreams.
They arrive uninvited, often with startling clarity,
while some part of us is still watching, aware that we're lying in bed.
Hypnagogia is really woven into the supernatural and a lot of the stories that we cover on this show.
Many spiritual traditions treat it as a thin veil between worlds, a doorway to astral projection, out-of-body travel,
or contact with spirits and the dead.