The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep.

Most of us all walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.

When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.

Many of my relationships began with an idea from a journaling session, which then led to actively reaching out and, over time, cultivating a transformational relationship. In order to maximize this experience even further, you can become proficient at directing your subconscious mind-wandering while you sleep. Inventor Thomas Edison said, “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” While transitioning from being awake to being asleep, your brain waves move from the active beta state into alpha and then theta before eventually dropping into delta as we sleep. It is during the theta window that your mind is most receptive to reshaping your subconscious patterns. Just before falling asleep, think and visualize about what you want your mind to focus on as you sleep.

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.

But the mind travels far—and mysteriously—in sleep.

It’s one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind’s
still working and you can ask yourself whether you’re asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

Dreams are associated with a state called REM sleep, the abbreviation standing for rapid eye movement. The REM state is strongly correlated with sexual arousal. Experiments have been performed in which sleeping subjects are awakened whenever REM state emerges, while members of a control group are awakened just as often each night but not when they're dreaming. After some days, the control group is a little groggy, but the experimental group - the ones who are prevented from dreaming - is hallucinating in daytime. It's not that a few people with a particular abnormality can be made to hallucinate in this way; anyone is capable of hallucinations.

We know only the ordinary states of consciousness in which we live; we do not have complete knowledge of reality. When we are awake, we are totally immersed in our waking world. When we dream, our activities, our world, and our understanding are completely different from when we are awake. When we go into the state of deep sleep, we lose consciousness altogether.

To the somnambulist, sleep-walking may seem more pleasant and less hazardous than wakeful walking, but the latter is the wiser mode of locomotion in the congested traffic of a modern community. It is about time to abandon judicial somnambulism.

Let me come back again to the waking state. I have no choice but to consider it a phenomenon of interference. Not only does the mind display, in this state, a strange tendency to lose its bearings (as evidenced by the slips and mistakes the secrets of which are just beginning to be revealed to us), but, what is more, it does not appear that, when the mind is functioning normally, it really responds to anything but the suggestions which come to it from the depths of that dark night to which I commend it.

I was in my bed trying to figure out why sometimes you can wake up and go back to sleep and other times you can't

Your behaviors before bed are coded into your long-term memory.1 While you’re sleeping, your brain processes everything you experienced that day. But not everything equally. This is why top-performing athletes — like Michael Phelps, the most winning Olympian of all time — create visualizations of success just before they go to sleep.