Did I Receive a Spiritual Download or Was It a Hallucination?

“Doctor, doctor, I hear random voices just before I fall asleep at night!”

If you confess this to your general practitioner, you may get a shrug and an assurance that those voices in your head are normal.

When we enter the state between wakefulness and sleep — known as hypnagogia — our creative mind takes the wheel, and our logical mind takes a back seat. And sometimes, the creative mind that’s in charge likes to send us vivid sensory hallucinations.

My hypnagogic dream

On the night of the March lunar eclipse this year, I woke up at 3:30 AM and couldn’t fall back to sleep. So I scrolled on my phone.

Two hours later, my eyelids turned heavy. On a whim, I decided to start a visualisation exercise — it accesses my inner wisdom — so that it overlaps with the onset of hypnagogia. You know, in case anything interesting came up.

The next thing I knew, my phone alarm went off. I woke up with the awareness that I received two impressions during my brief sleep:

1. The first impression was an image of a small study room with an open laptop on a table — a clear reference to the work I do on my laptop.
2. The second impression was oddly specific, and it was more of a direction than a visual or auditory hallucination: Look at the third line of the chorus in Roxette’s “Dangerous”.

Although Swedish pop duo Roxette’s songs were my jam in the late 1980s, I could only recall the first two lines of the chorus in their song “Dangerous,” which are “Hold on tight, you know she’s a little bit dangerous.”

I tried but couldn’t retrieve the third line from memory. So I googled the lyrics, and my mouth fell agape. The third line in that chorus reads:

She’s got what it takes to make ends meet.

If there’d ever been a message from my subconsciousness or higher consciousness, this sure seemed like one.

Three interpretations

Here’s some context: during the fortnight before this dream, I’d been wondering if I could call myself a writer even though the only writing I had been doing was writing on Medium.

That preoccupation became a filter for the way I interpreted the message. I took it to be a reassurance that my writing was good enough for me to call myself a writer. My focus was on the first part of the message (“She’s got what it takes…”).

I shared this dream with two friends J and F separately and asked for their thoughts.

J — who had been exploring investment opportunities to generate income — thought this was my cue to try to earn some income from writing. Her focus was on the second part of the message (“…to make ends meet”). I thought her preoccupation with income had similarly primed her for her interpretation the way my preoccupation did.

My other friend, F, is a highly intuitive fellow counsellor whom I worked with a few years ago. She has become a close friend who witnessed my internal world splitting up over the past two years and diverging into two paths — one, a familiar and grounded path guided by rationality, and the other, an unfamiliar and untethered spiritual path guided by intuition.

F’s interpretation of the message was the most literal and fascinating. She said, “It’s as if the message is saying you have what it takes to make your two separate paths join back together.”

Using the touching tips of her thumbs as a pivot, she joined her fingertips together to form a circle to illustrate her point.

“Like an Ouroboros,” I said.

The Ouroboros is an ancient circular symbol that shows a serpent eating its tail and symbolises a cycle of life, death, rebirth, and infinity.

I first learnt about it last year from a Korean reality show Physical: 100, and I came across it again as the name of a character in the TV series Loki. At the point of chatting with F, I didn’t yet know there was another synchronicity awaiting me.

While reading up about hypnagogia for this story, I came across a reference to a German chemist, August Kekulé, famously discovering the structure of the benzene molecule while in a hypnagogic state.

The breakthrough vision he hallucinated was an Ouroboros.

My takeaways

I like all three interpretations of my dream, and in particular, I’d like to see how F’s interpretation may pan out for me.

So did I receive a spiritual download or was it a hallucination? Maybe they are the same thing.

As for calling myself a writer, I’ve figured what I’m called is not as important as what I do. So these days, when people ask me what I’m up to, I simply say, “I write.”