Dreams, night thoughts, and entertaining hypnagogic nonsense
I’ve always been fascinated by the things we think, say, and doodle when our brains are in neutral, when we’re falling asleep, waking from a dream, sitting up in the morning (and other situations, like doodling while on the phone). For decades, I’ve kept a notebook (or an iPhone) by my bed to record what I call night thoughts, those strange, often disjointed and nonsensical ideas and phrases that drift through my consciousness while the rest of me is busy dogpaddling off to Slumberland.
The title for this piece, More Dreams Than Sleep, was itself a night thought. As I woke one morning, sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to shake off the night, it popped into my head, a leftover from something I’d been dreaming or working through in my sleep. Like a lot of these nocturnal words and phrases, this one can be read from different angles. But in that moment, it was entirely clear what the phrase meant to me. In Egyptian mythology, the Goddess Maat, the personification of truth and justice, weighs your heart on a scale when you die to make sure your virtue has kept your soul as light as a feather. I take “more dreams than sleep” to imply a similar weighing. You want your life to be more “dreams” (creativity, big ideas, love, joy, passion, positivity) than “sleep” (spiritual laziness, excessive materialism, the sleep of reason, negativity).
And therein lies one of the benefits of capturing your night thoughts. You gain insight into yourself, surreal and thought-provoking ways of looking at the world, fished from the depths of your id. They also offer seed ideas for books and short stories, articles, poems, songs, and the like, and a dream record to analyze. They are also an endless source of entertainment. I still chuckle wondering what was happening in my sleep to generate “you man-Lucy!” and “amoeba-shaped power clown.”
Over the years, I’ve collected hundreds of bits of such hypnagogia. Here is a small sampling:
Lucite cigarettes
Mind bone
Living in the apocalypse that fear itself is destined to create
All metaphysical dramas begin with Zero
A bunch of guys with Lee Marvin mustaches
Kung fu conflict resolution
An amoeba-shaped power clown
He had an asthmatic personality
Pesto and Charles
The next thing you know, it's Adolf and Eva in a bunker
Sometimes, I can feel the actual current of my life. It may not all be pretty, but it is beautiful.
A third way to die
A more profound question
You man-Lucy!
Red nickel #19
Shouldn’t being “full of yourself” be a good thing?
Sky criminal
Might as well meet in the foyer of Yankee Stadium
Into the graveyard of great ideas
Sorry, I’m not in Accounting
Tomorrow ain’t today
Within the oceans of possibility, art bathes
My spirit echo
There are no such things as inevitabilities, only overwhelming probabilities
That amazing moment when you realize that, alone, beyond the sight and judgments of others, you can be exactly as weird as you are
They both took off their shirts
Non-conceptual well-being
Dogshit mindfield
Human texture
I make sure to always sip, never finish, anyone's Kool-Aid (including my own)
There may be a little John Merrick in all of us, but not everyone has their bones in Michael Jackson's safe
William Blake didn’t think it was bad, he just thought it was sad
Just another spacetime Saturday night
Loving you oxygenates my blood
Spice logic
You didn’t know it, but I’ve been dancing. With all of you. The whole time.
Gareth Branwyn is a well-known writer and a pioneer of both online culture and the maker movement. He’s the former Editorial Director of Make:, was a contributing editor to Wired for twelve years, and a senior editor of Boing Boing print. He’s authored/co-authored over a dozen books, including The Mosaic Quick Tour (first book about the Web), The Happy Mutant Handbook (with editors of Boing Boing), and Borg Like Me (& Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems). He is currently a regular contributor to the Boing Boing and Adafruit blogs, does a weekly newsletter for Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, and just finished the second volume of his bestselling book, Tips and Tales from the Workshop.