Composing Oneself at The Threshold

“The thresholds—the two thresholds all of us pass over, descending into sleep, ascending into what we consider to be full consciousness—are the most precious, fertile, productive, and often fearful or blissful or alien territory we traverse as minds; perhaps as souls. As human beings, we are most present, most alive, certainly most creative, less hidebound, when we drift through these open doors, letting the screens slam behind us, or creak open before us.”—By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“In the curious intermediate states between waking and sleep—the ‘hypnagogic’ state that may precede sleep or the ‘hypnopompic’ state that may follow awakening—free-floating reverie and dreamlike or hallucinatory apparitions are particularly common.”—Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“Other terms for hypnagogia, in one or both senses, that have been proposed include ‘presomnal’ or ‘anthypnic sensations,’ ‘visions of half-sleep,’ ‘oneirogogic images’ and ‘phantasmata,’ ‘the borderland of sleep,’ ‘praedormitium,’ ‘borderland state,’ ‘half-dream state,’ ‘pre-dream condition,’ ‘sleep onset dreams,’ ‘dreamlets,’ and ‘wakefulness-sleep transition’ (WST). Threshold consciousness (commonly called ‘half-asleep’ or ‘half-awake,’ or ‘mind awake body asleep’) describes the same mental state of someone who is moving towards sleep or wakefulness but has not yet completed the transition. Such transitions are usually brief, but can be extended by sleep disturbance or deliberate induction, for example during meditation.” Wikipedia entry on “Hypnogogia”

Ruminant With A View

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

BRIDGE & TUNNEL New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—5/26/2014—On the thresholds between waking and sleeping, and sleeping and waking, I do my best work.

This content—and, in my case, it’s usually verbal, or “writing in my head”—never makes it directly to a page. This worried me as a child. I kept a notebook by my bed, and roused myself to write down whatever it was I knew would slide away from me, back into the dark, by morning.

Now, I have realized this state of play, on the thresholds, is another type of thing altogether. It is sufficient unto itself, most of the time. If a metaphor, or an image, or a quatrain occurs, comes to, or through, or upon me, the ephemeral, and exquisite composition itself is enough: no further work required.

Like fireflies, the sort of light one perceives, and generates, between sleeping and waking, is not possible to catch in a bottle. Nor should we try to.

Falling asleep, I may compose entire poems, and sound out the rhymes, arrange the lines into stanzas, and not once feel compelled to wake further, to leave the rapidly erasing page for the light; for ink. That I pass, fully, from the confines of the daily room, onto the threshold into the dark, and know the anteroom for what it is? Well, that is a twice-daily gift.

In the liminal state before waking, or after “first waking,” and then falling back into sleep, like a diver arcing backwards off a high board into warm water, the work, and play, is less word-heavy than story-driven. Some version of my recognizable self is almost always involved in the narrative—I am rarely a passive observer—but the realms I visit, somewhat conscious, or “conscious in another way,” are fabulous.

In the mornings, whether at 3 or 7, my dreams—though this word was to me always too narrow a term—are lucid and, seemingly, I can rouse from them and return to them several times, though I’m not truly interested in knowing much more about these states from a sheerly scientific point of view.

I prefer, when my eyes are closed, fully to close my eyes, and give that skeptical, dithering brain a chance to wriggle out of its usual bondage. Between the conscious, sun-lit, and communal work of the day, and the realm of deepest blackness—which may be, in fact, what death is for us all—there are two slim sills upon which we step, and from which we take flight.

Between them is sheer mystery and unknowing; the pitch-dark thing so many of us dread.

The thresholds—the two thresholds all of us pass over, descending into sleep, ascending into what we consider to be full consciousness—are the most precious, fertile, productive, and often fearful or blissful or alien territory we traverse as minds; perhaps as souls. As human beings, we are most present, most alive, certainly most creative, less hidebound, when we drift through these open doors, letting the screens slam behind us, or creak open before us.

Wikipedia helpfully fills us in a bit on “thresholds”: “In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning ‘a threshold’) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual’s liminal stage, participants ‘stand at the threshold.’ between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.

“The concept of liminality was first developed in the early 20th century by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep and later taken up by Victor Turner. More recently, usage of the term has broadened to describe political and cultural change as well as rituals. During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.”

Liminal states—falling asleep, slowly waking—are echoed in all human endeavor: the biological, biochemical ability to abandon “reality” for the demi-monde of dreams, for which we are wired as mammals, as homo sapiens, enables us (I believe) to imagine, to hypothesize, to expand our field of vision . . . if we permit ourselves to do so (and, of course, if we are not so spiritually snuffed out by backbreaking labor as to plunge into sleep, dreamless, and wake, vision-less).

Reading about humankind’s use of light-in-the-dark in Jane Brox’s book, Brilliance: The Evolution of Artificial Light, I was touched to the core by how long a tradition is the lamp; and our general desire to light the darkness.

Brox quotes Richard Nelson’s work on the Alaskan Koyukon people, whose winter was long, dark, and fearsome, but who lit their homes “by burning bear grease in a shallow bowl with a wick, or by burning long wands of split wood, one after another.

“But bear grease was scarce, and the hand-held wands were inconvenient, so in midwinter the dwellings were often dark after twilight faded.”

And here, in Richard Nelson’s account, is where my own ears pricked up: “Faced with long wakeful hours in the blackness, people crawled into their warm beds and listened to the recounting of stories . . . . The narratives were reserved for late fall and the first half of winter because they were tabooed after the days began lengthening. Not surprisingly, the teller finished each story by commenting that he or she had shortened the winter: ‘I thought that winter had just begun, but now I have chewed off part of it.’”

Though I know how radically different life is, and how miserable it can be—because I have lived it—without electricity, I also mourn experiencing the liminal thresholds “as a tribe,” as a family. Today, in the West, even couples rarely wake in the night to share dreams or visions: we have become, increasingly, isolated in our flights of fancy.

That we dream at all is a necessity and a gift, but that we once dreamed as a community, and valued the dreaming life, and now have so largely lost those capacities, is tragic.

As a child and, really, up until the age of 11, my dream life and waking life were anything but defined by rigid borders. As a three- and four-year-old in Pasadena, I was convinced, and the belief lasted for years afterward, that elephants had dangled their trunks in through my bedroom windows, just around the patterned café curtains. How real this image was, and is still, to me is a testament to how gentle is our species’ grip on shared reality.

In other cultures, in other ages, the reality of those elephants would not be questioned, not be (so to speak) held up to the light. My elephants would be dignified as a “vision,” not a “dream.” In early childhood, too, I was utterly certain that I could fly, as I “did so” almost every night, having crossed over the magic threshold.

Brox opens her book on artificial light (another meager term) with a discussion of the cave paintings of La Mouthe, created by Ice-Age artists 18,000 years ago in caverns deep in the earth. The creators of the wall paintings of Lascaux, with their horses and stags and bison, their musk oxen, ibexes and great cats, used nothing brighter than “a handful of lamps as they drew.”

Writes Brox: “It’s likely they saw only a small portion of their work at any one time, and it receded in darkness behind them and lay in shadow above them.”

And what better metaphor is there for the human condition than that? We exist, in a half-lit moment, between waking and sleeping, sleeping and waking. But, in those liminal moments, on those thresholds, we exist fully and truly.

Note: The photograph of the Lascaux wall paintings was taken by Sisse Brimberg, and derives from http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/wallpaper/photography/photos/cave-exploration/lascaux-cave-walls/.