The Space Between Waking and Dreaming

With thanks to our member, Carole Crawford, for this article.

For as far back as I can remember, my dreams have spoken to me.

Not always in words

Sometimes through colour.
Sometimes through a feeling I can't quite name.

There are dreams I remember decades after having them. Not because I can recall every detail, but because something about them stayed with me.

A particular quality.

A flash of colour.

A feeling.

A moment that seemed to carry a weight I couldn't quite explain.

And then there are those moments between sleeping and waking.

Eyes open.

The room familiar.

But somewhere else still present.

Perhaps you are still walking through a strange house. Still looking at someone who was both familiar and unknown. Still caught in the remnants of a place that existed only moments ago.

Then it falls away.

Or almost falls away.

You are awake.

We tend to think of dreaming as something that belongs to sleep. We close our eyes, and fragments of memory, sensation, emotion and experience may find their way into the strange stories of the night.

But dreams don't necessarily speak the language of explanation.

They can speak in metaphor.

In mood.

In movement.

I've never been particularly persuaded by the idea of a universal dream dictionary. That a house means one thing, water another, and a particular animal something else.

The same symbol can carry very different associations for different people.

For me, dreams seem to take things we recognise - people, places, memories, experiences, fears and hopes - and shape them into stories that may have little resemblance to waking reality.

The story may not be telling us something.

It may be showing us something.

So perhaps the question isn't:

“What does this symbol mean?”

Perhaps it is:

“What is happening here?”

And:

“What does it evoke in me?”

This is where my thinking about dreams meets hypnosis.

Because hypnosis also invites us to shift our attention.

Not into sleep.

Not away from consciousness.

But into a different quality of attention.

Awake, but somewhere else

When people hear the word hypnosis, they may still imagine someone being put to sleep, losing consciousness or handing over control.

Yet hypnosis does not require sleep. A person remains awake and aware.

What can change is where attention rests.

Think about becoming completely absorbed in a book.

Or music.

Or a film.

For a while, the room around you seems to recede.

You know where you are.

But your attention has travelled.

Hypnosis can involve this kind of absorption, alongside suggestion and focused attention.

And imagination is not simply about seeing pictures in the mind.

We can imagine a sound.

A smell.

A touch.

A conversation.

A possibility.

For some people, an imagined event may be strongly visual. For others, it may be more closely connected to emotion, language, bodily awareness or a sense of knowing.

There is no single way to imagine.

Perhaps that matters because imagination allows us to encounter possibilities before they have happened.

We can rehearse a different response.

Approach something differently.

Try on a future that doesn't yet exist.

Sleepwalking into awe

This is the phrase that came to me when I began thinking about the relationship between dreams and hypnosis:

sleepwalking into awe.

It sounds impossible.

And in a literal sense, it is.

But perhaps that's precisely the point.

Imagine walking into a room expecting nothing special.

Perhaps you've been having a difficult day. Feeling low. A little forgotten. Perhaps life has become grey around the edges and you have begun to believe that nobody really notices.

Then you open a door.

And there they are.

People you love.

Music.

Laughter.

Light.

A surprise.

For a moment, something inside you changes before you've even had time to think about it.

Wow.

The event itself is one thing.

The feeling is another.

That sudden shift from one internal landscape into another - from melancholy to wonder, from heaviness to possibility - is what I mean by sleepwalking into awe.

The body hasn't travelled anywhere extraordinary.

The room may not have changed very much.

But your felt sense of it has.

And perhaps this offers a way of thinking about hypnosis.

I'm not suggesting that hypnosis is dreaming.

It isn't.

Nor is it sleep.

It isn't that either.

Rather, hypnosis can create conditions in which attention becomes sufficiently absorbed that an imagined event can become vivid and immediate.

A voice might become more prominent.

A remembered place might return.

A future conversation might begin to take shape.

A sensation might become noticeable in a way it wasn't before.

It is about what can happen when attention, imagery and sensation interact.

The language of metaphor

Dreams have their own strange grammar.

They rarely stop to explain themselves.

They simply place us somewhere.

Something happens.

We respond.

We move towards something or away from it.

A door opens.

A road disappears.

A room changes.

Someone arrives.

Someone leaves.

Hypnotherapy can also make use of metaphor and narrative.

A person might imagine carrying a heavy suitcase.

They might picture standing at a crossroads, approaching a doorway or leaving something behind.

But the metaphor doesn't arrive with an instruction manual.

A crossroads isn't automatically a decision.

A suitcase isn't automatically a burden.

A door isn't automatically an opportunity.

Its significance belongs to the person encountering it.

And that is where I think curiosity becomes more useful than interpretation.

Rather than deciding what something represents, we can ask:

What do you notice?

What happens next?

What does this mean to you?

If something could change, what would you want it to be?

There is something important in leaving space for the person to discover their own meaning.

The practitioner can accompany that process without needing to have the answer.

The metaphor can remain open.

Perhaps that openness is part of its usefulness.

When imagination becomes experience

We can know perfectly well that something isn't physically happening and still respond to it emotionally or physically.

Think about remembering a particularly embarrassing moment.

Nothing is happening now.

And yet your face might flush.

Your stomach might tighten.

For a moment, you are back there.

Memory can do this.

So can imagination.

And hypnosis can deliberately work with this capacity.

We know the remembered or imagined event isn't happening in the room.

Yet the warmth, the sound, the anticipation, the response it evokes can still become part of what is happening for us.

It is not about confusing imagination with reality.

It is about noticing what becomes possible when we give an inner event our attention.

Perhaps this is part of the appeal of metaphor in therapeutic work.

It offers another way into something.

Not necessarily through explanation.

Through story.

Through sensation.

Through the possibility of experiencing something differently.

We don't always need to know

Perhaps we have become accustomed to believing that everything has to be explained.

What does the dream mean?

Why did I imagine that?

What does this symbol represent?

Sometimes the more useful response is simply to remain curious.

To notice.

To allow a thought, feeling or scene to unfold.

To see what happens when we don't immediately decide what something means.

Dreams remind us that the mind can create whole worlds from fragments of ordinary experience.

Hypnosis reminds us that imagination can become an experience while we remain awake.

Neither requires us to abandon reason.

Perhaps they simply reveal that human experience is larger than explanation alone.

There are things we understand through words.

And things we encounter through memory, metaphor, sensation and story.

The space between

Perhaps that is what draws me to the space between waking and dreaming.

Not because the two are the same.

They aren't.

But because both remind us that consciousness is not as simple as awake or asleep.

Attention can shift.

A thought can become a scene.

A memory can feel close again.

And suddenly, without going anywhere, we can find ourselves somewhere else.

Perhaps that is what dreams can offer us when we think about hypnosis.

Not a secret code.

Not an answer waiting to be decoded.

But a glimpse of the extraordinary capacity of the mind to create, transform and respond.

The ability to move between memory and imagination, thought and feeling, without the body having to go anywhere at all.

And perhaps there is more room for that capacity in our waking lives than we sometimes realise.