Hypnagogia: The Impact of Contention
Hypnagogia is described as the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. According to a 2020 Healthline article, “During hypnagogia, it’s common to experience involuntary and imagined experiences…. up to 70 percent of people experience these hallucinations, which can appear in the form of sights, sounds, or even feelings of movement.”
Hypnagogia can be used as the perfect metaphor for understanding the transitional state between knowledge and ignorance and the transitional state between empathy and apathy. The state of the world is in a deep state of hypnagogia right now as the involuntary experiences of politics, violence, and discrimination begin to appear. Occurrences of school shootings, waging poverty, epic war sagas, and the revolution of artificial intelligence have impacted one’s ability to discern and understand perspectives from one’s own.
Writer Andy Hopkins, in his 2022 article for Ball State Daily News, “Calling Apathy to Action”, writes, “one of the biggest issues facing today’s world is the lack of people who care…when asked about an issue, many may have an opinion about the topic, but how many people are out there taking action? Would we rather sit back and watch “Thursday Night Football” or “Grey’s Anatomy” than spend our time trying to make the world more sustainable?”
This begs the question of to what extent are people caring or not caring? Take the issue of school shootings. According to data provided by Education Weekly, “there have been 24 school shootings this year that resulted in injuries or deaths and 168 such shootings since 2018.”
One of the biggest points of contention has been to focus more on collective action and less on thoughts and prayers. Specifically, much scrutiny has been on those in local and state government positions and their reluctance to take real action regarding laws on gun control.
Through the lens of hypnagogia, the discussion around school shootings is going through a transitional state between knowledge and ignorance and empathy and apathy. It is impossible to ignore the harrowing school shooting incidents as they have happened at record speed. Due to the individual effects of privilege, everyone has a different opinion on what the best plan of action is. Some believe bans on guns are too drastic and imagine that their unalienable rights would be taken away. Some believe gun bans would only alleviate a symptom of a bigger problem. As a result, there is a delay in applying a plan of action.
Using hypnagogia as a metaphor is simply a mechanism to help explain the impact of contention that is going on today. Certainly, this metaphor can be another form of the popular euphemism “woke”. Nonetheless, what it also demonstrates is that knowledge and ignorance or empathy and apathy aren’t just a sudden occurrence.
It is something that transitions back and forth over time.
