The Flying Geese. The North Star. The Pin Wheel. These are some of the concrete names given to the symbolic heirloom quilts beneath which countless folks wake daily. It is these very names that lend narrative to the geometric arrangements of each piece of fabric, each shape cooperating with the next to give overall form to the quilt. An excellent example is the Double Wedding Ring quilt pictured to the right, which comes from my family’s collection and 
exemplifies the connection between form and narrative. This year we celebrate my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary, a marriage symbolized by the interlocking ring pattern. The countless anecdotes of those five decades are represented by the quilt’s many varied components, beneath which my parents woke together for decades of mornings.
Now imagine waking up in the morning, and even before you open your eyes, brightly colored geometrical formations undulate across the horizon of your mind, as though the quilt was in your head. Kaleidoscopic shapes and vivid hues plié in intricate patterns, and pirouette in spirolaterals, like a swirling technicolor digitalization of the Alhambra’s painted Moorish tiles. If the images are particularly strong, they will last even after you open your eyes, as though superimposed onto your bedsheets or your coffee cup by an old reel to reel projector.
According to 19th century psychical researcher Frederic Myers, these unusual visions are called hypnopompic hallucinations, a type of nonpsychotic illusion that can occur in the mysterious state of consciousness transitioning the moments between sleeping and waking.
The blog Mental Health Daily states that “There are various types of hypnopompic hallucinations that you may experience. Perhaps the most common is that of seeing visual images such as objects,… complex figures, geometric shapes, lines, [and] morphing shapes…” It seems fitting and dialogical, a kind of mathematical intertextuality that these geometrical visions can occur in the mind of body wrapped in reciprocating patterns of fabric. Architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander of UC Berkeley adds insight to this interesting occurrence when he explains that “In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.”
The hypnopompic hallucination and the geometrical quilt exist in part because of each other, and because of innumerable other similar patterns both within and around them…the angles of your bed, the shape of the theta waves you emit as you sleep, the trajectory of the morning sun. There is harmony there, in the strangeness of early morning hallucinations and the everyday quilt, harmony in the dialogue of the geometry all around you.
After many years of resisting, I have come to accept my own hypnopompic hallucinations as a unique expression of the mind, mysterious, and beautiful. I decided to cooperate with it by not fearing it or fighting it as at first I did. Initially I misguided myself into thinking it was not normal and therefore bad. I unfairly judged it, blinded by a bias that things should be a certain way. I did not understand it, did not try to understand it, and attempted 
unsuccessfully to repress the visions when they arose. The misfortune of this repudiation was that while I feared and fought it, the exquisite truths it offered were totally lost to me.
So many of us have come to expect our bodies to work in a specific way, as if there is an absolute right way and a wrong way, with oddities and idiosyncrasies considered intolerable. We often seek medicines or procedures for things we could leave well enough alone, things we might just as easily live with harmoniously.
Certainly I do not discount the many strengths of modern medicine, ill organs replaced and aggressive cancers defeated, precious lives extended. But in many ways, we have been overly indulged by the promises of modern Western medicine. It has allowed us to overlook times when we might cooperate with the uniqueness of our bodies, learn important lessons in compromise and acceptance, and experience harmony with variations in our physical and mental beings. These valuable lessons have priceless application to a needy world.
Incidentally, hypnopompic hallucinations are a quirky variation of being with which one can learn from and harmonize with. The Mental Health Daily blog tells us, “During the hypnopompic state of awareness, it is thought that we are in an emotional, dream-like state of consciousness. During this dream-like state, our brain is attempting to make logical sense of the experience, resulting in our own subjective interpretations. ” If my brain is attempting to make sense of its experiences, why should it only do so in ways I had come to believe are normal? Why would it have to be in words and images I myself could readily understand? Why wouldn’t the mind use geometry, a universal language, and a form of exquisite and exacting cooperation?
If we accept geometry as a key language of the universe, a language of relation and of cooperation, then hypnopompic hallucinations and traditional quilting patterns are merely iterations of truths in color and form. Even the process of the traditional quilting bee, a social gathering with purposes that include not just the finishing of a quilt but also the social connecting to others harmonizes with and echoes geometrical truths. There are wonderful insights to be found in both life’s abnormalities and its most everyday objects.
