The story behind the Hypno Vision Series

I was just about to fall asleep one night back in the

summer of 2011, when I saw the most peculiar multicolored firework explode right before my eyes, only it was actually behind my closed eyelids! At this phase of my life, I had very little time on my hands. I had two young children and a new baby son. My artistic output consisted mostly of drawings more than paintings. It was my hobby as and when I could squeeze it into my busy life. I was usually on the lookout for something interesting to draw or paint. I knew when I saw this incredible sight that it was the perfect subject. Although the explosion lasted only a fraction of a second, the image had been burned into my memory and I knew that I had preserved enough of it to create a relatively accurate approximation for a simple thumbnail sketch. I would later use it as a reference to create the very first of my Hypno Vision paintings.

Thereafter, I noticed a pattern. When I would lay down just before falling asleep, so many images would flash in front of my eyes. I found this to be especially apparent during particularly prolific times. It would happen during the pre-sleep state, called the hypnagogic state. Sometimes, when we lay down to fall asleep, we are startled awake by the sensation of falling. To me, it feels like slipping on a banana peel. This is called the hypnagogic jerk and it is usually when this happens that most people are able to recall their pre-sleep visions, known as hypnagogic hallucinations. This state, as well as the preconscious or hypnopompic state, are the perfect times for inducing visions from the subconscious mind. It is simply a way of accessing the infinite intelligence that we all have at our disposal, but it is best accessed while in an altered state of consciousness such as these two states. Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison are reputed to deliberately use the hypnagogic state to spark their creative genius.

I did not know how to capture all of these fleeting images. For an artist, such an amazing amount of inspiration felt like manna raining down from heaven. But it came on like a monsoon. It seemed as impossible as one might find attempting to catch the wind with their hands. These magical mirages were all so beautiful and amazing. I felt inundated by the sheer quantity of inspiration pouring through me. I also felt incompetent in my ability to render such fantastic figments into a visible and tangible form, given the limited time and resources I had at my disposal. Most of the time I just passively allowed the images to flow in front of me. I did not feel any urgency to jump out of bed at 12:00am, or whenever my tired head hit the pillow, to draw each and every image as it came before me, though the thought had crossed my mind. I also found that, were I to try to hold onto any one image, then the flow would cease. Often, the next day as I would sit to draw, I would feel the impulse to hit myself over the head with regret that I did not carry out the jumping-out-of-bed procedure as I had envisioned it. After some time, I had not noticed these visions quite as often, though I continued to draw.

Unlike the time when my kids were young, during the pandemic I found myself with swathes of time on my hands. I painted much more frequently, and I had begun to practice meditation. Within a few short months of consistently laying down on my back and quieting my mind, I began feeling eerie and uncomfortable wavelike sensations throughout my entire body. These uncomfortable sensations eventually subsided, and I began to see visions during my meditation. I saw reflections of myself in a mirror, sea turtles swimming in the ocean, windows, doors, trees, clouds and other seemingly frivolous fantasies. Very rarely I found myself dropped into random scenarios without any context of time or place. I saw myself watching from a third person perspective the goings-on of other peoples' lives. I also began to have vivid dreams and telepathy with non-physical intelligence. In short, I went through a spiritual awakening that opened me up to the non-physical universe. It had increased my still-mostly-latent psychic abilities, which I had been completely unaware of prior to this time. My pre-awakened self had been a fence sitter---an open-minded imaginative skeptic that came up with a number of what-if scenarios about the universe and our place in it.

I still can't say that I know that much, but after this awakening I was inevitably thrown from my comfortable fence. Needless to say, it was clear to me why we have hypnagogic visions in the first place. This is our portal to infinite intelligence, an intelligence that is beyond our limited and limiting concepts of mind, as defined by the consensus. Even among those who do not consider themselves to be "psychic,” there are many techniques for inducing extrasensory awareness. We are all psychic to a certain degree and, like a muscle in your physical body, we can strengthen our abilities with practice. Meditation is the starting point. I found that in the attempt to further explore these abilities, my visions began again with even more clarity than I had experienced all those years ago. Some were crystal clear and vivid as a photograph in my mind. Others came as color schemes with loose open-ended patterns that left room for me to fill in the blanks the next day. This time around, I decided I would catch the wind. I kept a notebook by my pillow and lost a bit of sleep in the process. But the more I paid attention to the visions, and followed through with painting them, the more they came to me.

Today, I still do not always use the visions I receive as inspiration. When they do come, there are just too many to paint all at once. They flash before my eyes like a movie. I do try to keep either a written record or thumbnail sketches and use them as and when I feel that I can. Many times, I am able to paint a few. But then I can’t quite accurately recall how the rest originally appeared to me. It is still good to have the written description or thumbnail sketch of these images. It is usually enough to spark some inspiration. However, I do utilize a number of other techniques for inspiring creativity. Many of my creations are actually an amalgamation of both the visions and my own waking-consciousness-state ingenuity.

It would be interesting to know how many other artists have experienced this phenomenon. I feel that, like Salvador Dali, many would credit their nighttime or nap time reveries as the most fruitful and fertile springboards for their own particular flavor of genius.