Highway hypnosis. Since hypnosis is not sleep, what is its relationship to sleep? When a person is driving a long distance on a highway, his eyes are focused only on the highway; he cannot look at anything beyond the highway for more than a few seconds. His eyes and his attention have to come back to the highway all the time. His awareness of the surroundings becomes narrower and narrower. This affects the content of his thoughts, which also become narrower. Although he is in a fully awake state, his awareness is submaximal and is continuously constricting to a narrower span. During this period of extremely limited awareness, it is as if he is in a trance state. He is dissociated from the awareness of his surroundings. Highway hypnosis is very dangerous. Eventually, if he does not pull over and stop driving, he will most likely fall asleep and lose control of the car.
After driving a period of time on a highway, a person goes into highway hypnosis, and very often highway hypnosis leads to sleep.
Hypnosis can lead to sleep. With the invention of the EEG machine, we now know that hypnosis does not equate with sleep. Schwartz, Bickford, and Rasmussen in 19SS reported that hypnosis and the awake state have identical EEG patterns. But typical sleep patterns on the EEG can be brought about in hypnotized individuals by means of appropriate suggestions. Hence, although hypnosis and sleep are two different states, given the appropriate suggestions of heaviness, tiredness, and sleepiness, one can pass from the hypnotic state to the sleeping state easily.
Dream state before sleep? David Foulkes, a US scientist, made a detailed study of the mental state of people falling asleep, and distinguished different phases. The first step is the loss of control over the flow of thought Thoughts begin to wander and go their own way. In the sleep laboratory, if the subject is awakened and questioned just before the appearance of a sleep pattern on the EEG, he reports that he has lost his orientation in time and space and is no longer aware of the reality of life around him. It is as if he is in a dream state resembling that of REM stage sleep, and sometimes it is impossible to tell them apart However, the EEG recording does not indicate any REM sleep and there is no rapid eye movement.
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