seeing stars - an expedition into the familiar

Friday 11th April, 2008: It is wonderful to discover the name of something that you have lived with since before you were born.

Bob gave an enchanted monologue today about her vision of a future for our two merging colleges. She talked about those abstract moving shapes and colours we sometimes look at after closing our eyes for sleep, and how these random images eventually coalesce into more vivid dreams.

Phosphenes.

Most times we do not bother to look at them, obscured by familiarity, phosphenes are as effectively invisible as the walls and furnishings of our dwellings, as noteworthiless as walking home, our hands, our favourite mug, and the scene outside our bedroom window. But sometimes we do look at this lightshow and invariably this looking will lead into sleep without a trace. Phosphenes are entoptic (not of the eye), like dreams, and memories...

As with many familiar things, there is more to phosphenes than initially meets the eye. They can be mechanically enhanced simply by applying light pressure to a closed eyelid; and cartoon ‘seeing stars’ can easily be induced by sneezing, standing up too quickly, or by a light blow to the head. And they can be magnetically, electrically and drug induced to greater glories.

It has been suggested that non-figurative Neolithic imagery may have been produced by shamans who enhanced natural phosphenes with hallucinogens. Such naturally occurring drugs would have been readily available to a pre-Google elite who knew where to look. Resulting shamanic trances would empower phosphene-derived images with meanings unknowable today. It seems that it is also possible that the physiological creators of phosphenes have been with us since our earliest human forms, that we may even share them with apes, maybe even other higher mammals...

There are two other phosphene inducers that rather tidily link up some previous blog concerns. “In a survey of 59 astronauts, 47 noticed phosphenes sometime during spaceflight. Most often they were noted before sleep, and several people even thought the light flashes disturbed their sleep. The light flashes predominantly appear white, have elongated shapes, and most interestingly, often come with a sense of motion. The motion is described as sideways, diagonal, or in-out, but never in the vertical direction. Although it is clear that they are related to high-energy particles in the space radiation environment, many details about them are still unknown.” Seeing stars in space…

And in a truly wonderful coincidence, neutrons generated in particle accelerators also trigger phosphenes in the human visual system. Dragons, even…

Thank you, Bob, for introducing me to phosphenes!

The time-lapse image is of the asteroid moon 45_Eugenia-01, in orbit around the asteroid 45_Eugenia. Discovered by a terrestrial telescope in Hawaii in 1998, and originally based on Napoléon Eugène (1856-1879), Prince Imperial (also known as Le Petit Prince), the only child of Emperor Napoleon III of France and his Empress consort Eugénie de Montijo (1826-1920). The unglamorous S/1998(45)1 was officially renamed Petit-Prince in 2003 in honour of St Exupéry's Le Petit Prince, 60 years after the book was written.

falling asleep

I had dozed for a while on the sofa yesterday having re-read some Selborne. I knew this sleep was a bad idea, and sure enough, there was a big gap last night which I filled by plodding towards the end of a novel set in the Black Death. On the way back to sleep, wistfully (maybe) as a reaction against the unseasonal snow over the rest of England, I recalled a childhood summer.

I think that I was eight. I was staying over at my grandmother’s. It was a very warm summer's evening and I was still awake, irritated. There was too much light, too much life pouring in through my windows. I simply could not get to sleep while everyone else was out and about. An aunt had come to see why I was still awake. I clearly remember asking her, "why can't I remember falling asleep?"

"Because you haven't been to sleep yet."

"No, not just tonight, why can I never remember falling asleep?"

"Well, it's because when you are asleep, you are asleep. You can only remember some of your dreams from your sleep, and maybe then for only a short while after you have woken up."

Aunt Hilda commanded both awe and fear in me – she was a Spiritualist. She spoke with the dead. My child-logic informed me that of all people, she must have an answer to this kind of question. Though I was unsure why I had come to this conclusion. "No, why can't I remember the last moment before I go to sleep? The moment in the middle of being awake and being asleep"

She frowned and smiled. "It's not that simple. It's not like the difference between morning and afternoon - midday by the clock. No, it's more like the difference between daytime and night time - you can watch that happen, but it is impossible to say exactly when night time begins, even though it's just a matter of light and dark. And Ah! If you remember that moment you are trying to find between being awake and being asleep, you may never wake out of it, or so they say."

I knew that she was trying to calm me with her commonsense-logic, nearly as much as I was really annoyed by the things that 'they' do or 'they' say. Yet this simple statement shocked me to the quick. Why should remembering a single moment do this? How could this be? Wasn't it dangerous to leave moments like these lying around for children to find? But, how could I remember something if I never woke up, if the future was held back in the present?

"How, why?" I pursued.

"Well, maybe it's because you would be neither awake nor asleep. We should be one or the other - we can't be both at the same time can we? But being neither may be very serious, a long way away from the rest of us, maybe even in another world, another time, another us." She was wise but didn't really have a solution that I wanted to hear. And I was worried that 'another us' meant her spirit world. I read myself to sleep with my comforter, St Exupéry, maybe something like:

'Then you don't remember. This is not the exact spot.'
Another voice must have answered him, for he replied to it:
'Yes, yes! It is the right day, but this is not the right place.'
(from The Little Prince, Antoine de St Exupéry, 1943)

I do not believe that we ever spoke of it again, though I continued to try to map my nightly falling without any success. It was almost as if the soft seduction of falling proscribed its memory, that observation somehow interfered with the actual falling; that the falling knew that it was being observed; that having passed through, the gate to consciousness was firmly closed behind you, and though you could still catch sight of all that lay there, it was impossible to recall any of these experiences. Perhaps I was also afraid of the consequences of success.

This is a photograph of my aunt Hilda, the spiritualist. And guessing by the clothes, it was probably taken in the late 20s maybe early 30s. Despite appearances, she is not Miriam Margolyes.