I have been giving talks and teaching workshops the past few days, and so have had little time to think about this week’s blog entry, which is one reason it is day late. One thing that comes up at every workshop I teach is the area of drifting off in meditation.

Meditating in an open, receptive manner will lead to relaxation and to periods of drifting, and occasionally to sleep itself. Part of the reason for this is that there is no energy created from doing a task in meditation. Since we are not busy bringing our attention back to the breath or any number of meditation techniques, once our thinking starts to die down, there is nothing much holding our attention, and nothing to do. Our mind doesn’t just get quiet, it drifts towards sleep.

In "Unlearning Meditation" I write about hypnagogic states and how they may function in meditation. That is what many go through when they are drifting towards sleep. But in meditation our intention is not to fall asleep—that is we don’t sit down to meditate with the idea of falling asleep in the meditation sitting—so we may just graze the surface of sleep for a while and enter into a hypnagogic state, one that lingers instead of just being part of the transition into sleep.  

I believe that these hypnagogic states can be used to develop tranquility in meditation, as I have seen it happen countless times with many students over the past two decades. At first, it is easy to think that you have fallen asleep when entering into one of these hypnagogic states, since there can be dream-like scenarios, unusual images, dots of light or a field of light, or fragmented thoughts and bizarre sentences. But these are not dreams. There is nothing to be learned from trying to interpret the images or thoughts, and trying to do so will often interrupt the development of such states. My suggestion is to let the images, lights, and thought fragments form and to trust that your awareness of them will wake you up just a little bit within the state. You may then find that doing this will prolong the hypnagogic state in such a way that you begin to wake up in it, and may then be able to direct your attention and have more coherent thoughts. In this way it can open up into a state of tranquility, one that may actually be quite calm, settled, and aware.

For more about this process of “drifting off and waking up” you can read chapters 13 through 16 in “Unlearning Meditation.” I would be happy to read of your experiences of drifting off and waking up in meditation, so please feel free to email at Jason@skillfulmeditation.org