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SLEEP: HYPNOSIS AND THS AS A SLEEP PRECURSOR
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Since hypnosis is not sleep, what is its relationship to sleep? I am going to illustrate this with the familiar experience of ‘highway hypnosis’. When a person is driving a long distance on a highway, his eyes are focused only on the highway; he cannot look at anything beyond the highway for more than a few seconds. His eyes and his attention have to come back to the highway all the time. His awareness of the surroundings becomes narrower and narrower. This affects the content of his thoughts, which also become narrower. Although he is in a fully awake state, his awareness is submaximal and is continuously constricting to a narrower span. During this period of extremely limited awareness, it is as if he is in a trance state. He is dissociated from the awareness of his surroundings. Highway hypnosis is very dangerous. Eventually, if he does not pull over and stop driving, he will most likely fall asleep and lose control of the car.
After driving a period of time on a highway, a person goes into highway hypnosis, and very often highway hypnosis leads to sleep. This raises the possibility of a continuum from the fully awake state through the hypnotic state to the sleeping state:
Awake → Hypnotic state → Asleep
With the invention of the EEG machine, we now know that hypnosis does not equate with sleep. Schwartz, Bickford, and Rasmussen in 1955 reported that hypnosis and the awake state have identical EEG patterns. But typical sleep patterns on the EEG can be brought about in hypnotized individuals by means of appropriate suggestions. Hence, although hypnosis and sleep are two different states, given the appropriate suggestions of heaviness, tiredness, and sleepiness, one can pass from the hypnotic state to the sleeping state easily.
David Foulkes, a US scientist, made a detailed study of the mental state of people falling asleep, and distinguished different phases. The first step is the loss of control over the flow of thought. Thoughts begin to wander and go their own way. In the sleep laboratory, if the subject is awakened and questioned just before the appearance of a sleep pattern on the EEG, he reports that he has lost his orientation in time and space and is no longer aware of the reality of life around him. It is as if he is in a dream state resembling that of REM stage sleep, and sometimes it is impossible to tell them apart. However, the EEG recording does not indicate any REM sleep and there is no rapid eye movement.
When I question people about whether they can remember how they fall asleep, most people say they feel sleepy and tired and that their eyelids are heavy and they cannot keep them open. They are unable to concentrate and no longer can be bothered with what is going on around them. Their awareness of their surroundings becomes less and less, and somehow they fall asleep. No one can remember exactly how they pass from the waking state to the sleeping state; they just know that it is a very vague and transient period. In fact we all go through a very brief period of hypnotic state before we fall asleep. This is the stage in which we feel that we can no longer be bothered with what is going on around us and we are dissociated from our surroundings, as if we are in a dream state, as observed by Foulkes. I believe that this period of drifting from the awake state into the sleeping state is a brief hypnotic state and has nothing to do with REM stage sleep; I call it the transitional hypnotic state or THS:
Awake →Transitional hypnotic state → Asleep
Everyone goes through the THS between the waking and sleeping states. We do not feel awake and alert one second, and then all of a sudden asleep the next. When we fall asleep, we go through a brief THS which is a transit between the waking and the sleeping states. The THS is the precursor of sleep. As you know, we have little or no control over falling asleep. We cannot close our eyes and say the magic word ‘sleep’ and then fall asleep. However, if we can induce ourselves into this THS, sleep will follow. We have no control over sleep, but we have full control over the THS. Remember how in highway hypnosis the driver passes from the awake state to the hypnotic state and then, if he is not careful, into the sleeping state. The THS is the switch that we can switch off and fall asleep.
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