Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #28. Sound Your Brain with Onar

Onar, or oneiric sonar, is a hack for plumbing your unconscious mind in search of new ideas during hypnagogic sleep. It's similar to methods used by Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison.

Hypnagogia is the mental state between waking and sleep, the "half-asleep" state. The word comes from the Greek hypnos (sleep) and agogeus (leader or conductor); hypnagogia is the state that leads us into or out of sleep.

Tip

Some researchers draw a distinction between hypnagogia, which occurs when we are falling asleep, and hypnopompia, which occurs when we are waking up.

Many thinkers throughout history have found hypnagogia to be a fathomless well of creative black gold. For example, the surrealist painter Salvador Dali developed a technique to help him visualize dream landscapes of bizarre beauty, which he would paint upon awaking.

Dali is also said to have trained himself to doze in a chair with his chin resting on a spoon that was held in one hand, propped by his elbow, which rested on a table. In this position, when his muscles relaxed and he was on the verge of falling asleep, his chin would drop and he would wake, often in the middle of a hypnagogic dream or vision which he would then proceed to paint.¹ For instance, this technique likely inspired his painting "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumblebee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening."²

Such techniques can also be useful to hardheaded businesspeople and inventors. For example, Thomas Alva Edison ...