The Brothers Grimm have a story about a shoemaker down to his last scrap of leather. More from habit than hope, he cuts their shape at night, and goes to bed with the shoes unmade. In the morning they're sewn and set out, better work than his own hands would have managed. We're told it's the work of elves.
With a twist, but not much of one, my own mornings sometimes work this way.
I used to be a long sleeper. Nine hours, deeply asleep and engaged in a rich dream world. At seventy-six it’s a bit different. Sleep is less even, six or seven hours but still vivid with dreams, and I wake early. And, if I have the time, half awake, I drift. Body relaxed, eyes closed. My thoughts loosened, I follow them as much as I direct. I have come to count on this in my getting up and facing the day. If I'm lucky, I get an hour or more like this.
What's so special about falling asleep and waking up, especially if I can prolong it?
Let's go back in time.
Aristotle noticed the symmetry between the two thresholds to sleep, going under and surfacing, two thousand years ago. In his treatise "On Dreams", he writes that anyone can confirm the special nature of these states by attending to “the affections we experience when sinking into slumber or when being awakened.” A classification of this came much later. Alfred Maury coined hypnagogique in 1848, describing the hallucinations that occur in the interval between waking and sleep. The waking-side term arrived fifty-five years after that, from Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, who introduced hypnopompic in 1903, in his posthumously published Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.
Physiologically, the textbook account is a shift from alpha toward theta rhythm as the brain settles, corresponding to the lightest stage of sleep, the one so ambiguous that people roused from it often insist they hadn't been asleep at all. A recent review complicates this version. Ghibellini and Meier's 2023 update in the Journal of Sleep Research finds that hypnagogic experiences are typically preceded by both alpha and theta activity weakening together, not a clean crossover from one to the other, and that visual and bodily hypnagogic experiences carry different signatures entirely. I have no EEG of my own confirming any of this happens when I drift. What I have is the drift itself.
Contemplative traditions got there before the sleep labs. Yoga nidra, a guided meditation practiced lying down that moves attention systematically toward the edge of sleep, treats this threshold as restorative on its own terms, not a degraded version of waking or a failed attempt at sleep but something with its own standing.
Let's add some Freud to the mix. Freud's distinction between primary process, associative, image-bound, indifferent to logic and to time, and secondary process, reality-testing and logical, was sketched in 1900 and formalized in a short 1911 paper. Dreaming was his paradigm case of the first, ordinary waking thought his paradigm case of the second. What I'm describing sits at neither pole. Something primary-process is running, loosely associative, prone to image rather than argument, while something recognizably secondary-process hasn't left the room. I'm watching, just not fully in charge.
Ordinary mind-wandering finds me elsewhere than perhaps I intended. This is different. I enter the drift by relinquishing directedness on purpose, and I can end it the same way. That's a second-order act, choosing not to steer for a while, and choosing it counts as an exercise of the very agency it sets aside. Freedom of attention, it turns out, includes the freedom not to direct it.
Herbert Silberer gets close to this particular territory with a method rather than a theory. His 1909 paper describes deliberately holding an unfinished thought while letting himself grow drowsy, then recording what happened. Trying to fix an awkward sentence, he watched the effort dissolve into an image of himself smoothing a piece of wood. His instances are seconds long, caught once and gone. Mine run much longer.
Ernst Kris described this a generation later, in a 1936 paper and then fully in his 1952 book Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, calling it a regression in the service of the ego, a controlled, reversible slackening of secondary-process control that lets primary-process material surface while the ego stays present enough to use what comes back. I get it. That's different from pathological regression, where control is simply lost. Here it isn't lost. It's set down and picked back up. Freed imagination. A sort of dance as if no one is watching, except the dancer in retrospect.
The most famous case in this literature turns out to be an example of exactly this, and not of a dream at all. August Kekulé's account of seeing the benzene ring, a snake seizing its own tail, is usually retold as something he dreamed. His own words say otherwise. He describes turning his chair to the fire and sinking into Halbschlaf, half-sleep, and the image that came he called a Träumerei, a reverie, the same word he used for an earlier vision that had come to him wide awake on the top deck of a London bus. The most consequential piece of insight in the history of organic chemistry arrived in something much closer to my own morning hour than to a night's dream. Not sleep. A doze by the fire. I wrote about the case myself, in a chapter on problem representation in dreams for a 1993 volume built around the controversy over what actually happened to him.
Joseph Caston's 2011 paper, “Agency as a Psychoanalytic Idea,” gives a useful way of asking whether this surrender of attention is really a loss of agency. He proposed three markers of competent agency: reversibility, self-observation, and appropriateness, meant to apply jointly to any stretch of conduct. Reversibility is easy enough here: I come back from the drift without effort, toward sleep or up into full waking. Appropriateness holds too: morning, unhurried, nothing at stake, which is what would distinguish it from the same physiological drift happening somewhere dangerous. Self-observation is more tenuous. It doesn't disappear altogether. A thin observing stance remains, enough to notice what's happening without converting the noticing into direction, and enough that I can report on the state afterward rather than simply reconstruct it as a stranger would.
Caston's reference list includes a 1984 paper of mine, “The Two Concepts of Action and Responsibility in Psychoanalysis,” occupied with exactly the problem his criteria would later formalize, the difference between action and mere behavior. He was building on ground I'd staked out two decades earlier. There is something pleasingly circular about finding, at seventy-six, that an argument I made at thirty-four has come back through someone else's work to help me understand what happens in my own mind before breakfast.
The state is more than restful. Ideas arrive there unbidden, often as fragments, images, a phrase, the shape of an argument before the argument's fleshed out. I've come to think of these as seed crystals, small and often oddly formed but able to collect patterns that fit and expand their lattices. Eventually I open my eyes, reach for the phone, and hand one of them off, the way the shoemaker left his leather out, before whatever's left of sleep takes me back. What follows is a different kind of attention, directed and collaborative, where the fragment gets turned over, extended along lines I hadn't spelled out, tested against what I already think, expanded in ways that keep the shape of the original crystal while filling it out. It's an augmenting function, not authorship handed off, something that takes the seed I give it, turns it rapidly through possibilities I hadn't yet articulated, and hands it back enlarged.
The Trickster in the Bot, the book I've just finished on large language models, recognition, and personhood, grew in part out of these morning intervals between sleep and the day. The irony isn't lost on me. A book concerned with agency, personhood, and what happens when human thought meets an artificial interlocutor took shape partly in moments when I deliberately loosened my own agency and handed what surfaced to the very kind of system I was trying to understand. This post is another instance of the method it describes, started as fragments this morning and worked into its present shape through the same back and forth later in the afternoon.
I think I need a nap.
So attentional freedom, as I'm using the term now, isn't simply the capacity to direct attention, or even the capacity to let directedness go. It's the freedom to move between them, to relinquish control, notice what arrives, and then take up the fragment and work it deliberately. Sometimes that means handing the leather across the threshold and seeing what another kind of intelligence can make of it. My elf, as it happens, this morning was Claude.
References
Aristotle. (1907). “On Dreams” (J. I. Beare, Trans.). In Parva Naturalia.
Caston, J. (2011). “Agency as a psychoanalytic idea.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 59(5), 907–938.
Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. (Standard Edition, Vols. 4–5).
Freud, S. (1911). “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning.” Standard Edition, 12, 213–226.
Ghibellini, R., & Meier, B. (2023). “The hypnagogic state: A brief update.” Journal of Sleep Research, 32(1), e13719.
Grimm, J., & Grimm, W. (1812). “Die Wichtelmänner [The Elves and the Shoemaker].” In Kinder- und Hausmärchen.
Kekulé, A. (1890). “Rede.” Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft, 23, 1302–1311.
Kris, E. (1952). Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. International Universities Press.
Maury, L. F. A. (1848). “Des hallucinations hypnagogiques, ou des erreurs des sens dans l'état intermédiaire entre la veille et le sommeil.” Annales Médico-Psychologiques, 11, 26–40.
Miller, R. (2005). Yoga Nidra: The Meditative Heart of Yoga. Sounds True.
Myers, F. W. H. (1903). Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Longmans.
Schwartz, W. (1984). “The two concepts of action and responsibility in psychoanalysis.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 32(3), 557–572.
Schwartz, W. (1993). “Problem representation in dreams.” In J. H. Wotiz (Ed.), The Kekulé riddle: A challenge for chemists and psychologists (pp. 277–283). Cache River Press.
Silberer, H. (1909). “Bericht über eine Methode, gewisse symbolische Halluzinations-Erscheinungen hervorzurufen und zu beobachten.” Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, 1, 513–525.
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