Daytime parahypnagogia

The summer I was 19, I worked in the laboratory of an aluminum plant, running various analyses required during various stages of aluminum production.   One of the analyses (for CaF₂) required me to wash a long row of filter papers -- maybe 15 to 20 -- where each filter was filled with a sample, and each filter was embedded in a funnel.  I washed each with a squeeze bottle.  After I finished, I waited until all the filters had drained, then washed them again.  I might repeat this process five to ten times.

It was not an exciting part of my day.  But at least one time, during a long stretch of washing filters in the middle of a tedious afternoon, something curious occurred.  I found myself listening to a conversation going on in my own mind.  Two people -- as I recall, a man and a woman -- were talking to each other.  I didn't know the speakers, and their conversation had nothing to do, so far as I could tell,  with any event or even thought from my own life. 

It was like overhearing a conversation between strangers on a bus.  Or listening to a radio program.  It lasted no more than a minute.  I wasn't asleep.  I was standing, watching the draining filters, water bottle in hand.  There was no visual component.  I wasn't dreaming or hallucinating.   If asked, I would never have claimed that I had been listening to a real conversation.

That afternoon in the laboratory was the first time I recall that odd experience, but it's happened many times since then.  Right up until the present.  It's never traumatic or upsetting.  I'm not dizzy or confused when it's over.  The closest I can come to describing the experience is that it's a bit like daydreaming, except that I do not intentionally produce or direct the "conversation," and the subject being discussed might as well be from outer space.  What the "speakers" are talking about seems to have no relationship to any experiences of my own.

I learned today that this experience has a name.  It's a form of hypnagogia.  It's sometimes called "daytime parahypnagogia" to differentiate it from other forms of hypnagogia, which usually are associated with stages of the sleep process.  It's been described as

the spontaneous intrusion of a flash image or dreamlike thought or insight into one's waking consciousness. DPH is typically encountered when one is "tired, bored, suffering from attention fatigue, and/or engaged in a passive activity." The exact nature of the waking dream may be forgotten even though the individual remembers having had such an experience.   Gustelle and Oliveira define DPH as "dissociative, trance-like, [...] but, unlike a daydream, [...] not self-directed ….

--Wikipedia

Wikipedia describes the experience as a "waking dream," but I'm always fully aware of my surroundings -- for example, I know I'm running a calcium fluoride analysis -- and I never believe, as one does in a genuine dream, that the conversation is real -- except insofar as one feels that a radio drama (back when such existed) really existed, even knowing it was performed in a studio.  I've compared it to daydreaming, because you can daydream in depth about tomorrow's activities while performing an activity that doesn't require much concentration.

Being the person I am, I of course like to assume that my susceptibility to daytime parahypnagogia suggests great creativity on my part.  Obviously, I suspect, I have untouched talents for writing fiction, because my mind is constructing fictional conversations about unusual (for me) topics almost against my will.  There is genius in that skull of mine, just dying to burst out and amaze the world with Tolstoy-esque literary expression.

Alas, there are no studies that suggest that my little plays in one act represent such talent any more than do a boy's dreams of baseball heroics mark a future World Series star.   But it does show that in even the dullest of us there are hidden activities going on inside our minds that leak out only on rare occasions.

I've never heard anyone else brag or complain about having similar "intrusions" into their waking consciousness, so it may well be fairly uncommon.  Since I've already bragged -- if that's the proper term -- back in November 2014 of having numeral synesthesia, there are cynics who may now choose to take my claim of daytime parahypnagogias with a grain of salt.  Yeah, right, you're "exceptional," as so many have pointed out to me.

Based on a teenage experience -- which I'll save for some future time -- I firmly believed for most of my life that I was a latent epileptic.  I therefore carefully avoided looking at  flashing strobe lights.  Then, one of a number of medical tests performed nine years ago firmly established that I had no susceptibility whatsoever to epilepsy.

This was quite a blow, as you can imagine, to my quest for uniqueness.  It would be too bad if my pretensions to both synesthesia and parahynagogia should be similarly stripped from me.  But I feel confident they will not.