Awake sleep
Between waking and sleep there is a threshold. Contemplative traditions have explored it for centuries; neuroscience has measured it for a few decades. This study sets them side by side, without mixing them up, and asks what they can tell people who drive.
Study: this is not health advice. Before it becomes a Threshold piece, EOC reviews it.
What we know
- Drivers feel sleepiness coming
- In a simulator, 28 young, sleep-restricted drivers felt sleepy long before they fell asleep at the wheel. Some, however, underestimated how likely they were to fall asleep. Reyner and Horne 1998, DOI 10.1007/s004140050131 · simulator.
- Lucid dreaming exists and can be measured
- Lucid dreamers know they are dreaming and signal it from sleep with agreed eye movements. It is rare and often lasts a few seconds. Zerr, Adelhöfer and Dresler 2024, DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.03.008 · laboratory.
- Yogic sleep: evidence still weak
- For yoga nidra, a 2026 review finds only five small, varied studies, in adults with insomnia or poor sleep quality and concentrated in India: certainty about effects on sleep is very low. Singh and colleagues 2026, DOI 10.1007/s11325-026-03685-0.
From light to the circuits of wakefulness
A cue from the news: the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, as reported by RSI (Fabio Meliciani, in Italian).
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics (Optica press release, 5 October 2026). Optogenetics switches chosen neurons on or off with light.
In 2007 a Stanford team used light to stimulate the orexin (hypocretin) neurons of sleeping mice: the transition from sleep to wakefulness became more likely. Adamantidis et al., Nature, DOI 10.1038/nature06310.
This is basic research in animals: on its own it says nothing about driving or about treatments. When sleepiness comes, the answer is still to stop.
What we do not say
No relaxation technique makes driving while sleepy safe. When sleepiness comes, you stop.
Neither yoga nidra nor any other practice takes the place of a night's sleep or a nap at a rest area.
No exercises while driving. The threshold is studied while stationary.
The question we keep open
Can people learn to recognise their own sleepiness? It is a question for our scientific partners, not a promise.
What we know about perceiving our own sleepiness, and its limits.
The voice of a yogic sleep practitioner alongside a scientific voice, not a borrowed quotation.
In Ascona, since the early twentieth century, a place of research into body and consciousness. We have already recorded voices there.
What the study still lacks
Before it becomes a public piece of The Threshold.
Chosen with care, with a name and a context.
«Awake sleep» as the first Threshold notebook, outside Volume I.