ASMR was discovered in 2007, when an anon named “okaywhatever” posted about it on a health-related online forum, describing a tingling sensation she’d had since childhood, triggered by certain audio or visual cues. So many people recognized this previously undescribed phenomenon that online groups sprang up to discuss it, and in 2010 a participant in a Facebook group, Jennifer Allen, designated it “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.” Fifteen years later, there are thousands of YouTube videos meant to elicit ASMR, published research trying to find biologic correlates and sticking ASMR-experiencers into MRI machines, and the term has become a colloquialism.
I first heard of ASMR in 2014 when I read this New York Times piece, which made me incredibly excited. It described something I’d experienced my entire life, but never heard or read about, nor talked to anyone about, because my ASMR triggers are weird. And if you’ve never had it, it sounds creepy to hear that someone goes into a trance and get tingles down their body over weird cues like hands flipping newspaper pages or scratchy voicemails.
So the day I read that ASMR article, I blasted it to all my family and friends, saying OH MY GOD THIS THING, this thing!! DO YOU HAVE IT TOO?!? But no one did. It was just me.
Still, if you’ve experienced ASMR, you would not question whether you’d felt it. It’s extremely distinctive and undeniable, and feels like going into a trance where everything else in your field of vision and sound fades out, and your focus narrows in on the cue, while strong, pleasureful tingles radiate from the base of your skull. I’ve tried ASMR videos and they don’t work for me. But still, I’m glad to know I’m not the only one, and that there’s a word for it now.
But this post isn’t about ASMR. It’s about sleep disturbances, particularly sleep-stage and REM disorders like sleep paralysis, narcolepsy, lucid dreams, and sleep hallucinations.
Because my sleep disturbances have given me a theory, as they often do. And as is typical, when I went to research the theory, to see what else I could find, I found a bit of evidence in favor, but it’s extremely light.
The theory is that it’s the disturbances themselves that cause every bit of creativity or insight I’ve ever had, or why anyone has ever thought I was smart. And that if my sleep was normal, I’d probably be dumb.
Now, this could just be my sleep demons trying to convince me that that they’re good, actually. Could all be nonsense. But Substack is full of some of the most creative and insightful people I can find in one place. So really, this post is made in the hopes that some people will read it and say yes, this also happens to me! And then they will tell me about it, so I can either add evidence to my theory-pile, or toss it in the discarded theories bin. And maybe someone will even have a name for it.
Fair Warning: if you’ve never had dream-related disorders or experiences, this post may very well send you to sleep.
Also: shout out to David Dennison here, who got me thinking about this, with his Note about not realizing til he was an adult that most people don’t experience sleep paralysis.
I’ve always had a problem with sleep. Mostly, I’ve slept way too much. As a child, my parents had to drag me out of bed, and mornings have been my life-long enemy. Most of my life I’ve slept excessively, with full 8-9 hours on weekdays, and 10-12 hours “catching up” on the weekends. This was not from depression or any medical condition I’m aware of – I’ve never been depressed, nor barely even sad, on anything but a handful of days.
But I sleep terribly all night, until the only time that I finally get into deep, delicious sleep, which is right in the morning when I’m supposed to be waking up. Louis CK has a bit where he describes his resentment at being woken up in the morning, as being “fathoms deep in a river of warm chocolate, and Sleep is an ancient whore with twenty tongues just blowing me purrrrfectly and speaking a dead language feeding syrupy heroin directly into me.”
This speaks to me. Being such a bad sleeper that you’ve put electrical tape on every possible light source in your room and have to triple-load your black-out curtains really sucks, especially when the only time you sleep deeply is right when everyone else is waking up.
I solved this problem in my 30s by just medicating with stimulants. I first tried taking a few caffeine pills when my alarm went off, but that didn’t work at all. So then I went to Adderall, and that works just fine. I don’t think I have ADD, nor do I find Adderall pleasurable like some people seem to. But for the past decade, here’s how my mornings work: I wake up to my alarm, take my 10 mgs, and go back to sleep. Then, I wake up very slowly about two hours later, and can get up like a normal person, or at least not in a stupor like I used to.
Until I found a fix, I thought I just had some kind of deficit of natural energy. I now realize it’s because my sleep is screwed up. I have frequent sleep and REM disturbances, and I think my brain has always been trying to make up for poor quality sleep with sheer quantity. It’s possible I have narcolepsy or something similar, though jumping through the hoops for a sleep-study seems pointless if it’s genetic and they can’t solve it. And anyway, sedatives at night and stimulants in the morning is the protocol for treating narcolepsy, so I already do half of that.
I’m going to describe my sleep weirdness below, and I promise I’m not trying to bore you to death. I’m doing this because I’m wondering if any of you fine and creative Substack people experience similar issues. It’s unlikely anyone has my exact problems, but some might be familiar. So here’s the deal:
First, I go into sleep paralysis and have sleep hallucinations at least once or twice a month. If you’ve never had these, this is how it works: you’re in between dreaming and awake, aware you’re laying in your bed as if you’re awake, and everything seems normal except for a hallucination that is EXTREMELY VIVID AND REALISTIC, and almost more vivid than waking life.
The hallucination can be something as ordinary as hearing someone you live with speaking to you, or walking around the room, but later you wake up and realize they weren’t home at all. Often, they are terrifying, but they don’t have to be. People notice the terrifying ones because the other thing that happens is you can’t move or speak, because your body is paralyzed during REM sleep so you don’t act out your dreams. But in sleep paralysis, you’re in an in-between stage, not actually in REM but half-awake, yet also dreaming enough that it creates the effect of a waking hallucination. And the awareness that you can’t move will strike you as a very big problem when you’re hallucinating about something terrifying that you want to get away from and can’t.
The most frequent hallucination in sleep paralysis is apparently of some type of demon or succubus, often on top of you and trying to suffocate you. I’ve never had that one, but some terrifying ones I’ve had are that a gigantic man with a machete is standing at the foot of the bed in the dark, or that my bed is full of snakes moving around under the covers, or one where a giant tornado is right outside the window, coming directly at me.
I cannot emphasize enough how realistic these are, and how full of absolute terror they cause you to be. You try to move just a pinky finger or a toe, or to make a noise or yell, because you feel that if you could move the slightest bit, the spell of paralysis will be broken. Often times, I’ll manage to make a noise that my husband says sounds like Sloth from the Goonies, and he’ll put his hand on me to wake me up, to my intense relief. But if I can’t manage to wiggle a toe or get something external to wake me up, then I’m just trapped in it, in pure terror.
But they’re not always bad. You can have good hallucinations too. And for me, I have these often enough that I can usually recognize when they’re happening, and sort of struggle to stay at just the right state of wakefulness where I can control the hallucinations and turn it into the dream I LIKE, aka a lucid dream. “Struggle” is the right word, though it’s hard to describe what that means exactly. It’s almost like being weighted-down in the water, and struggling to afloat, but not pushing TOO hard, because then you just wake up and can no longer enter a fantastical world where you control all the images and sensations. If you allow yourself to go too far into the dream, you lose control and will stop knowing you’re dreaming, but if you take too much control, you wake up. It’s a delicate balance.
Anyway, I’ll just be honest here: 95% of the time, if I know I’m in that lucid dream/sleep hallucination state, I just go straight for the sex dream. Let me re-emphasize, these are life-realistic – orgasm and all. You can feel and hear everything in a more-real-than real-life version, with whatever you want to be happening, happening. So that’s pretty fun. Though you’re not really in your right mind in this state – you’re half asleep after all – so the things you want to be happening can be pretty weird, and not what you’d pick while awake. Anyway, the other 5% of the time, I go for flying dreams.
People who only have a sleep paralysis experience once or twice, if they’re already open to supernatural beliefs, will often attribute it to actually being visited by demons (or angels or ghosts). Which I can understand, because they truly are realistic. You don’t get that “it was just a dream” feeling, like when you wake up from a normal REM dream, where it quickly starts to fade away. It feels like it really happened. So I can understand why someone who only had one might believe that what happened was real. Tucker Carlson’s silly demon in bed with his dogs story was most likely him having a sleep hallucination, for instance.
Second, when I’m falling asleep, I feel a “pulse” in my brain.
Now, I know there are no nerve-endings in the brain, so this doesn’t make sense. But I also get migraines, and I know that people on certain medications can feel “brain zaps”. So it seems that all of these things are illusions, or your mind interpreting something else as if it were a strong physical sensation inside your skull.
I have googled every possible way to describe the pulses in my head, and never find anyone else describing this. The pulses are relaxing, and also make a noise. It is not a hypnic jerk, which is that jolt you sometimes get as you’re falling asleep and suddenly feel like you’re falling. But it’s similar in creating both a noise and a sensation, just in a soothing way. The best way I can describe it is as a pulse that starts in the middle of my brain and radiates outward, like a ring shockwave. I tried to get AI to make a portrayal, but it didn’t do a good job, because the pulse isn’t an explosion and doesn’t radiate outside my head. But the noise in this video is close to accurate:
I also tried to create my own visual representation of what it feels like, and this is as close as I can get:
If anyone reading this thinks it sounds at all familiar, please let me know! I would love to not be the only person who feels “sleep pulses”.
Third, I wake up a lot every night, which is really annoying and makes me feel like I never get truly deep, restful sleep. My dad sleeps like me, and he DID do a sleep study, and they said he woke up more than 30 times at night, though he wasn’t aware of that.
Fourth, my dreams are WILD, and I remember at least one every night, unlike my husband who only remembers about one dream per year. I won’t bore you describing my dreams, but they’re like movies: long, action-packed thrillers. When I’ve known I was dreaming, I’ve zoomed into scenes to check that I was correct that my dreams are in photo-realistic, high-def crisp detail, and they are. This is incredible to me, because when I’m awake, I can barely even imagine someone’s face in my head. I can’t visualize anything well while I’m awake, only fleeting, fuzzy pieces, and never a whole image. But while dreaming, it’s legitimately like that Inception movie.
Fifth, I start dreaming almost immediately when I fall asleep, which isn’t the way your sleep cycles are “supposed” to work. I know I do this, because in high school I would fall asleep in class a lot, and was always dreaming when woken up just a few minutes later (often drooling, with my head on the desk). This is what makes me think my brain is doing something a lot like narcolepsy, which is when “the sleep cycle is disrupted, blurring the lines between wakefulness and sleep, causing people to enter REM sleep almost immediately (within 15 minutes) instead of the usual 60-90 minutes, leading to sudden sleep attacks, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis, because the brain loses its ability to properly regulate sleep stages”, according to Google.
What Does Any of This Have to Do With Creativity or Insight?
Okay, so my sleep is weird, so what? My theory is that being in these half-asleep, half-awake states is responsible for every creative idea or “insight” I’ve ever had. Why? Well, mostly because my brain told me it was true, this morning during my daily dream-state meditation.
I don’t actually meditate. But every morning, I lay in bed for an hour or two in a half-asleep, half-awake state, thinking thoughts, before I get up. In this state, my mind roams free. Grand theories develop, questions form, ideas crystallize, nonsense happens.
But now that I’ve spent the day actually researching it, it turns out that this liminal dream state allows a process where “New memories mingle in novel and abstract ways with older ones as a means of consolidating them, laying down tracks in our brains for later recollection. Neuroscientist Karl Friston, who studies consciousness, proposes that this mashing together of old and new is a process that helps to minimize redundancy and complexity in our memory system, and prepares us to navigate a fuller range of possible scenarios in our waking lives.”
Many mornings, I come up with brilliant treatises for Substack. But then I don’t end up writing them, because once I get up, my brain leaves the free-roaming zone, and becomes dumber, more business-like, and less interesting, and the treatise no longer seems brilliant. In fact, while in this liminal state in bed, I don’t always realize that I’m partially asleep…it FEELS like I’m totally awake, and it’s only later that I realize part of my ideas were dreams and nonsense.
For example, this morning, I lay there and thought up this whole post for Substack. But in my mind, there was also a person named Suzette, a woman from Substack that I’d been in correspondence with, and Suzette had a lot of really compelling evidence that was crucial to this piece. But now that I’m awake, I realize there is no Suzette. I dreamed her.
I think these liminal dream states are responsible for most, maybe all my ideas, rather than the other way around, or just a coincidence. And mostly why I think that is because I’m not very clever. But people are often fooled into thinking I am, which is weird. If I drill down and ask them why they think that, I always get the same answer, which is not that I have any particular mental skill whatsoever, but that they find me “insightful”. I’m really trying to write this factually and not in a manner that sounds boastful. But people use that specific word for me a lot…friends, teachers, bosses, whatever. So doesn’t it seem weird to be “insightful” without actually being particularly smart??
This is not me trying to be humble, as I truly think my brain is rather slow at processing. The main reason I don’t think I’m very smart is because I am not good at any discrete mental task.
Like, none of them. If I play a game with other people – ANY GAME – I will suck at it. I can’t play cards, or chess, or Trivial Pursuit, or Jeopardy, or Apples to Apples, or Monopoly, or any game at all, without being a slow and confused dope. Okay, that’s not entirely true because I’m actually psychotically good at Pictionary and Charades, but those are the only ones, and they both involve guessing what someone else is thinking or trying to ESP your thoughts into your teammates, which I think goes back to that “insight” factor, which seems to be the only thing I have.
But anything else…with numbers, words, shapes, quickness, literally anything…I blow. I’m not good at art. I’m not good at math. I speak only one language. I play no instruments. I can’t read music. I can’t do crossword puzzles. I can’t do Sudoku. I’m not quick on my feet. My memory stinks. I’ve never guessed the answer to a riddle in my life. I take giant pauses in the middle of my sentences when I’m talking, and it’s not because I want to sound like Obama, it’s because I’m trying to remember the word I want to say and I can’t think of it.
My sense of direction is poor. I’ve gotten lost in the woods, in cities, and walking around the block at my Grandma’s house. I can’t think of jokes until well after the moment has passed, unless I’m drunk. I can’t calculate figures in my head, or remember numbers. I don’t even know my own husband’s phone number. We tried playing board games during COVID, and were so perplexed by the instructions for Pandemic, a game described as being appropriate for ages 8 and up, that we gave up in confusion. Instead we played Battleship, a game for 5-year olds. I have to use subtitles and rewind scenes just to follow what the hell is going on in any movie I watch. My father wrote a graduate-level chemistry textbook with a title I can’t even pronounce, but I almost flunked high school chemistry because I could never comprehend how to balance a chemistry equation. I don’t get why people like Shakespeare. Kids in school developed skills like juggling or gleeking or folding origami, and I have none.
I literally don’t have a single discrete cognitive skill in any of the categories one might care to measure, other than being fairly verbally adept, if only my brain could remember the damn words I’m trying to say. I google “what is the word for when XYZ” at least once a day, because I can’t remember the words I already know.
Given all that, I find it very strange that on any discrete mental ability, I am solidly middling, except that I am legitimately really good at theorizing about why and how things happen, seeing the “big picture”, and convincing people that my predictions will occur and my reasons are right. And I guess that’s why people call me “insightful.” Though it seems very odd, to me, that I could be good at putting things together into an idea, or breaking them down to their elements, when I don’t have a single stand-alone skill that should help me do any of that.
So, my theory for today is that the only reason anyone has ever thought I was “smart,” when my brain is rather sluggish, is because I’ve spent every day of my life in several hours of a liminal, half-asleep, dream mode. And I think being in that state allows thoughts to run wild and make new connections and pare out the junk, without my stodgy, very slow pre-frontal cortex to quash it all down and tell the ideas they’re stupid.
This of course all runs counter to everything you usually read, which is that your brain works best when it’s well rested, and that sleep is the most important thing. It’s true that if I don’t get enough sleep, I can palpably feel myself getting dumber. But then there’s also that point where you’re so sleep deprived that you almost become brilliant. I call it my “toddler on crack” mode. When I don’t get enough sleep for multiple days in a row, my brain starts spinning, and I’ve come up with some of my best arguments and material in that state. I always have to pay the piper though, because it’s a guaranteed migraine the next day.
So, what do you think? Could it be? Are sleep disturbances a magical unlock to insight and creativity, rather than something to fix? Is it actually good to spend an hour+ every day in a half-asleep trance? And most importantly…
Do I Have Any Real Evidence Besides My Own BS?
Yes, a little. Not a ton, but I got up this morning and checked with my best friend Google, and there’s actual evidence in this vein. Here are some points in the “maybe screwed up sleep can sometimes be good” column:
There are studies showing that narcolepsy enhances creativity. For example, this one that hypothesized that “Given their life-long privileged access to rapid eye movement sleep and dreams, we hypothesized that subjects with narcolepsy may have developed high creative abilities.” They tested narcoleptic and normal people, and found that the narcoleptics scored higher on multiple objective tests of creativity and creative performance.
A bunch of brilliant people from history apparently used tricks to purposely interrupt their dreams and max out the insights they could glean from them: “Rather than leave such inspirations to chance, American inventor Thomas Edison designed a strategy for mining his dreams for material. He would doze off with a steel ball in each hand. Once his body went limp with sleep, the balls would drop to the floor with a clatter and wake him up. He could then recall details of his dreams and record any insights. This approach was later adopted by many other creative giants, including inventor Nikola Tesla and surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.”
There are other studies that test this in-between dream stage for creative enhancement, and they all show the same thing: problems are solved faster and hidden connections are made: see here, here, and here. That last one found that “creative people sleep more, later, and less well,” and that “among all the participants, the higher the level of visual creativity, the lower the quality of their sleep” and that “the higher the participants’ level of verbal creativity, the more hours they slept and the later they went to sleep and woke up.”
My dad has all the same sleep problems I do, and while he seems very normal and not particularly bright if you talk to him, he has achieved fairly high levels of what I’d call creativity on objective measures, as he has almost 150 patents, and not bullshit patents either, but ones for new substances that are used in commercial and industrial applications. His type of creativity is absolutely nothing like mine, but we are both frequently captured by ideas from our dreams, while being stumbling around as dopes in everyday life.
Some of the best Substack pieces I’ve read are by authors who admit right up front they were drunk when they wrote them. That’s not the same as being in a liminal dream state, but it’s similar. It’s a state where your brain’s allowed more freedom to run free.
Walt Bismarck is frequently morally repugnant, foul, and overall objectionable on multiple dimensions, yet also undeniably one of the most creative if not THE most creative writer (and music-creator) on Substack, with pieces that leave you reeling. And he frequently stays up for 2-4 days straight and works himself into a sleep-deprived state that borders between genius and psychosis.
There are known polygenic factors that make both high intelligence and bipolar disorder more likely to occur within the same family, and bipolar disorder is known to be exquisitely sensitive to lack of sleep. The line between brilliance and bipolar mania seems rather thin indeed, and maybe sleep is part of that equation. You can see this revealed in much of Freddie deBoer’s writing.
Does Any of This Sound Familiar to Any of You At All? (please say yes)
Alright, I’m already embarrassed by this piece. I went on in a self-indulgent manner about my sleep weirdness and my mind. Gross, I’m sorry.
But I really, REALLY want to know, do any Substack people resonate, or have similar experiences? Please god, let there be some. Let some psychiatrist or neurologist come here to tell me that yes this is all well understood, and not to worry. I just want to not feel alone, besides my dad emailing me his movie-script dreams.
If there is anywhere with lots of people with no skills but insight, it’s here. You’re my kind of people. In fact, I believe someone once described Substack as just a place for insight porn. Seems about right. But there are more people with all different forms of creativity here than I’ve found anywhere else, so I’m hoping at least a few will read this and say “yes, me too, I also have sleep demons, but sometimes they’re my friends.” And then maybe someone will come up with a good word (or words) for it. Which is the most important part!
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