Once you have your Transition Trek images and other psychic senses firmly implanted in memory, you no longer need your narrative. The actual words are unimportant, and you should forget them and just move along the trek while activating all the psychic senses as cued by the environment. But here is the thing. Thoughts other than those concerned with the trek may worm their way into your mind alongside the images just the same as do thoughts when you are out hiking in the real world. And guess what? They are those same worrisome and troublemaking thoughts that have kept you awake for ages. If this becomes a problem, we need to add one last component: an Audio Track.
Using your psychic voice to recite an Audio Track while moving along the Transition Trek engages that extra level of concentration to ensure you don’t revert back to fears, conflicts, or worries that might get your intellect involved in real-world concerns. If you want, you can simply recite the trek’s words. But my favorite solution is to have a tune going through my head, one without lyrics. You might choose Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or one of Chopin’s nocturnes. The theme from Star Wars is a little overly dramatic, but Rey’s theme from The Force Awakens might work.
If you choose a piece of popular music with lyrics, it is best to use one you have never seen in video form, because if you have, you will undoubtedly have images that will compete with the Transition Trek images. The words themselves will contain images and that is enough to contend with. Choose judiciously. I frequently use “When You Close Your Eyes” by Carly Simon because it is about hypnagogia:
When you close your eyes do you see
White Lorelei, she’s a dream
She’s not half as magic as she seems
But she’s so much fun to be with
When you close your eyes do you see
Places that you’ve never seen
Yet you’ve been there
You’ve been walking on the edges of a dream
And you’re so much fun to be with
Big surprise, you’ve been informed you’re not asleep
Hard as you try you were never really meant to weep
When you close your door with a sign
Do not disturb, are you disturbed to find
That it’s just as magic as it feels
And you’re so much fun to be with
This is a song from the 70s, but it is still available on iTunes as well as Amazon. Using a song has several advantages. First of all, having a tune running through your head is something we do all the time when out hiking. Plus, words with accompanying music make them easier to remember. A pleasant tune also sets a mood that can be conducive to sleep. Thus, music with lyrics along with the Transition Trek is a triple-threat to insomnia, an approach to occupying the mind’s thought processes to ward off the hypnagogic images and voices. I am thinking you probably don’t want to use something by Black Sabbath. But then again, if you are that special kind of person, maybe you do. Whatever puts you to sleep. Just remember that the song is only an accompaniment to the Transition Trek, and that the Trek’s images are most important.
As an alternative, you can recite a poem or prayer you have memorized. I frequently use the first stanza of Kubla Khan (1798) by Samuel Coleridge:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
You could use the entire poem if you have a good memory for such things. Some will choose a prayer, and if you’re using one of the treks other than the City of God, The Lord’s Prayer will work well; however, if you are using the City of God trek, which already has the Lord’s Prayer imbedded, you will want to pick something else.
Another of my favorite solutions is to use a few lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest because of its relationship to sleep:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. [A4, S1, L148-158]
Sleep, dreams and visions. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Yet another option, and this is one I particularly like, is to memorize and recite one of Sappho’s poems:
APHRODITE’S DOVES — Sappho ~ 630 – 570 BC
When the drifting gray of the vesper shadow
Dimmed their upward path through the midmost azure,
And the length of night overtook them distant
Far from Olympus;
Far away from splendor and joy of Paphos,
From the voice and smile of their peerless Mistress,
Back to whom their truant wings were in rapture
Speeding belated;
Chilled at heart and grieving they drooped their pinions,
Circled slowly, dipping in flight toward Lesbos,
Down through dusk that darkened on Mytilene’s
Columns of marble;
Down through glory wan of the fading sunset,
Veering ever toward the abode of Sappho,
Toward my home, the fane of the glad devoted
Slave of the Goddess;
Soon they gained the tile of my roof and rested,
Slipped their heads beneath their wings while I watched them
Sink to sleep and dreams, in the warm and drowsy
Night of midsummer.
This poem has the advantage of being set in the evening as the sun goes down, similar to our Transition Treks. The point of knowing the lines so well that you can recite them without hesitation or conscious monitoring while doing the Transition Trek is that you are occupying that portion of the intellect, your psychic voice, that will not ordinarily shut up. You don’t try to shut it up, as many suggest, by using mind-clearing meditation techniques. You use this extra level of mental function for your own purposes instead of allowing it to engage in some heated argument or try to find a solution to a problem.
All of these auxiliary Audio Tracks will have images imbedded in their words also, and this then will create a situation where we have dueling images within psychic space: Transition Trek images along with Audio Track evoked images. When we are out on a hike in the real world, we have the real world that we see and are a part of, and we are also possibly engaged in a real-world conversation, plus we have the psychic world through which we simultaneously have mental images and voices inherent in whatever remote subject we are thinking about. Now we find that even in the psychic world, we have that same dual situation: a Transition Trek in which we are actively engaged, but also an extrasensory hyperspace with a voice that also needs to be engaged in this additional verbal activity. It is almost as if that psychic body we have been considering is as complex as the real-world body. It even has a voice.
The bad news. Sometimes at the end of the Transition Trek, particularly when you first start using it, you will still be awake, still in hypnagogia and a little ticked off about it. As I stated before, you should go back to the beginning of the Transition Trek and go through it again. Perhaps, you have done that, and it is still not working. What to do now? Well, get control of your frustration, and let’s find out.