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Hypnagogy is the elective place where body and world periodically fade and an epiphany takes place, thus repeating circadianically the cycle of birth and death
In this short paper I want to convey a personal experience that allowed me to live the Silberer's phenomenon myself, that is, the dissipation of a processed thought occurring under conditions of particular fatigue or in the transition between sleep and waking and replaced by the appearance of a vision which - as Freud notes - «turns out to be a substitute for what are as a rule abstract thoughts» (Freud, 1899, 503).1
A prerequisite to the appearance of the hypnagogic phenomenon is, according to Francesco Napolitano, a «gap between the regressive intensity of different ego functions […]. Rather, a perfect synchronization of the withdrawing ego's substructures accounts for the fact that there are other people who virtually don't know the hypnagogic condition» (Napolitano, , 206).2
While a lag between «the investment in a specific ego structure, i.e. consciousness, and the disinvestment in another ego structure, for example the motor apparatus» (, 206) is also implied in dreaming, not all «dreamers» experience hypnagogic fantasies, and unfortunately I belong to this latter category.
In Freud's writings and in the analytic literature there are some very interesting examples of this phenomenon that enables to catch «in the very act the process of transforming thoughts into images […] which might be compared to an element of a dream» (Freud, 1899, 503). I chose one example from Silberer that is particularly enlightening. As we read it, we understand that it has some elements which are curiously consistent with the themes I am going to address.