Why We Built the Serial Diverse Hypnagogia-Pass

A few years ago we came across a strange little corner of sleep science: a technique built out of boredom, on purpose. Dr. Luc Beaudoin, a cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University, had noticed that a mind kept awake by worry is a mind following a thread — one thought pulling the next, on and on into the small hours. His fix was almost mischievous. Feed the mind a string of images so random and unrelated that no thread can form. A cow. A ladder. A spoon. He called it serial diverse imagining, and it's better known by its popular name, the cognitive shuffle.

We read through what he'd published, tried it ourselves for a few nights, and understood right away why it had picked up a following. It's elegant. It doesn't ask you to relax, or breathe a certain way, or believe anything in particular. It just asks you to picture things.

That last part turned out to be the whole problem.

Two kinds of minds the shuffle doesn't reach

Ask most people to picture a cow and they can. But ask someone whose nights are already ruled by anxiety, and the picture doesn't stay a cow for long — worry has a way of grabbing whatever image is nearest and bending it back toward itself. A ladder becomes a fall. A spoon becomes tomorrow's argument. The shuffle depends on the images staying neutral, and for a mind primed to worry, neutral is hard to hold onto.

Then there's a smaller, less talked-about group: people who can't reliably picture much of anything on command in the first place. Somewhere between 1 and 4% of people have aphantasia — little to no voluntary visual imagery, a mind's eye that simply doesn't produce pictures on request (Zeman, Dewar & Della Sala, 2015). For them, "picture a cow" isn't a hard instruction. It's an impossible one.

Beaudoin's technique rests on a quiet assumption: that everyone can reliably summon a neutral image when asked. For a lot of people, that assumption just doesn't hold — not because anything's wrong with them, but because minds don't all work the same way once the lights go out.

A third gap that had nothing to do with imagery

There was a third piece missing, and it had less to do with the mind and more to do with habit. Most advice about falling asleep starts from the same place: put the phone down, dim the lights, close your eyes. Reasonable, as far as it goes. But plenty of people have already built their nights around a screen — something quietly playing while they drift off. Telling that person to put the phone away and imagine a cow isn't meeting them where they actually are. It's asking them to change two things at once: their whole bedtime ritual, and the mental effort on top of it.

We didn't think that was a fair ask. If a screen is already part of someone's night, the useful question isn't how to take it away. It's what should be on it.

Where the three needs actually met

Once we lined these three groups up next to each other — the ones whose imagery gets hijacked, the ones who can't summon imagery at all, and the ones who never wanted to close their eyes in the first place — one shared need ran through all three: none of them needed to generate the image themselves. They needed someone else to hold it.

That's a small shift on paper, but it changes the shape of the whole technique. Instead of asking a mind to produce a neutral picture under pressure, we could simply show one. The image stops depending on the state of the mind that's supposed to summon it.

What we ended up naming it

There's a word for the drifting, half-lit stretch between waking and sleep, the place where thoughts stop connecting to one another and stray images start turning up on their own. It's called hypnagogia, and it isn't somewhere you push your way into — it's somewhere you drift across, usually without ever noticing the exact moment it happens.

So we built a version of Beaudoin's shuffle that shows the image instead of asking you to make one: a word, then a matching picture, one after another on a dark screen, no talking, just soft background sound underneath. We called it the Serial Diverse Hypnagogia-Pass. It's a bit of a mouthful, but the name says exactly what it does — a pass, in the sense of a route through a mountain or a crossing between two places, that carries you toward hypnagogia instead of leaving you to find your own way there.

None of this replaces the original research, and we don't think it should — Beaudoin's work is the reason the whole idea exists in the first place. What we built is our own answer to the parts of it that didn't reach everyone. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, the sessions are on this site, and we'd genuinely like to hear how it lands for you — your story helps us understand who this works for, and who it doesn't.

References

Beaudoin, L. P. (2013). The possibility of super-somnolent mentation: A new information-processing approach to sleep-onset acceleration and insomnia exemplified by serial diverse imagining. Cognitive Science Research Project, Simon Fraser University.

Beaudoin, L. P. (2014). A design-based approach to sleep-onset and insomnia: Super-somnolent mentation, the cognitive shuffle and serial diverse imagining. Paper presented at the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Québec, Canada.

Zeman, A., Dewar, M., & Della Sala, S. (2015). Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia. Cortex, 73, 378–380.