Charles Dickens' Hypnagogia, Dreams, and Creativity

Penumbral thoughts: Contents of consciousness upon waking

“…To the best of our knowledge, however, no previous study has examined penumbral thoughts from a psychological science perspective. This omission is perhaps surprising, given 1) the ubiquity of regaining consciousness as a daily experience, 2) it is frequently studied in other disciplines i.e., through literary or cinematic representation (as in Proust's 'Swann's Way' [11], discussed in [12], or Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' [13], discussed in [14]), and 3) the insights gleaned from behavioural and physiological studies of sleep inertia. It reveals a gap in understanding between the content of thoughts during sleep (i.e., dreaming; [15,16]) [9,[17][18][19][20][21][22], and the content of thoughts during full wakefulness-both of which have been studied intensively in psychological research.…”