Sleeping, Waking, and Crossing the In-Between: When Consciousness Changes Configuration

Perhaps the artist perceives differences within dreaming before we are able to explain them. In Sandman, for example, space changes, an absent person returns, a house gains a corridor that never existed, and yet we still feel that we are somewhere. Art does not demonstrate the neurophysiology of sleep, but it can preserve nuances of experience that science later attempts to measure.

Sleep is therefore an everyday yet radical example for W40/ 2026. Every night we cross:

wakefulness → sleep → wakefulness.

Perhaps the most informative part is not found only in states A and B. It is found in the crossing between them.

Before N1: closing our eyes already changes the territory

Close your eyes for a few seconds.

The visual scene is no longer being continuously updated. This does not “switch off” the occipital cortex. During relaxed wakefulness with eyes closed, however, posterior alpha power — approximately 8–12 Hz — typically increases. Recent studies relate this change partly to modulation and functional inhibition of external visual processing, as well as to changes in competition between sensory modalities, rather than to a simple “clearing” of a brain area.

This changes a BrainLatam intuition.

Closing the eyes may not free an empty space in the occipital cortex so that it can simply receive “internal data.” Instead, the demand imposed by the external visual stream decreases, allowing other relationships to gain relative weight. Interestingly, when spontaneous visual imagery appears with the eyes closed, posterior alpha may decrease again. Internally generated imagery can dynamically recruit posterior systems as well.

In BrainLatam language, we can begin by asking whether APUS becomes less rigidly constrained by the currently visible territory even before N1 begins. The territory has not disappeared, and we have not “gone inside.” What changes is the configuration of information organizing the Body-Territory.

Sleep begins before we know how to say that it has begun

Li and colleagues analyzed EEG data from more than a thousand people and showed in 2025 that falling asleep follows a dynamic compatible with a bifurcation: a tipping point appears, preceded by critical slowing down, after which the trajectory of the system changes regime. In some participants, this dynamic point emerged while conventional sleep scoring still classified them as awake.

This summarizes one of the central problems of W40/2026:

A may already be ceasing to be A before we are able to name B.

Then hypnagogia arrives. A thought loses its sentence. An image appears without having been deliberately constructed. While lying still, we may experience movement; without displacement, we may experience distance and another spatial position.

From the perspective of Alfredo Pereira Jr.’s Triple-Aspect Monism, we do not need to say that “consciousness left the body.” The materiality of the living body, dynamic patterns of information, and sentience are jointly necessary aspects of conscious experience within an integrated reality — not three separate worlds.

The organism remains situated while its material, informational, and felt configuration changes.

APUS does not leave the Body-Territory. APUS changes configuration within it.

N1: when APUS becomes less imposed by the immediate present

The environment continues to participate. Touch, gravity, proprioception, the vestibular system, hearing, temperature, and internal signals have not disappeared. Yet the dominance of the shared visual territory decreases, and hypnagogic imagery, memories, and associations may participate differently.

Neuroscience does not recognize one universally accepted count of “12 senses.” When BrainLatam refers to 12+ senses, it is an invitation to move beyond the five senses taught at school and include multiple exteroceptive, proprioceptive, vestibular, and interoceptive systems.

In our conceptual extension, APUS helps us think about the incorporated external territory — position, posture, direction, reach, and movement — while Tekoha helps us think about the territory felt from within.

In 2023, Horowitz and colleagues showed that targeted dream incubation during N1 was associated with better subsequent creative performance and greater semantic distance, especially when the incubated theme appeared in the dream report. This does not make N1 a “stage of creativity,” but it does suggest that this liminal region may permit combinations that are less available during stabilized wakefulness.

Perhaps the artist recognizes this terrain: not another world, but other possible relationships within the same living materiality.

N2: can Tekoha become more flexible?

Here we begin to move from evidence toward a BrainLatam hypothesis.

Tekoha helps us ask about the territory felt from within: breathing, heartbeat, temperature, visceral states, affect, and embodied history.

N2 is a more stable stage of sleep, characterized by sleep spindles and K-complexes. These events participate in the architecture that maintains sleep and are associated with plasticity and memory-consolidation processes.

Current science, however, does not demonstrate that N2 is specifically a “flexibilization of Tekoha.” We can instead transform that intuition into a question:

If APUS loses part of the rigidity imposed by the present visual environment during sleep onset, does N2 create conditions in which relationships among memory, affect, and bodily state become more reorganizable?

That is a BrainLatam hypothesis.

And the territory reaches sleep with us. Beck, Loretz, and Rasch showed that the temporal proximity of stress matters for sleep depth. When the stressor occurred before sleep, its effects appeared more strongly at the beginning of the sleep period; when participants anticipated a stressor after awakening, the effects shifted temporally toward the expected event.

The future did not move backward in time.

The anticipation of the future was already materially happening in the organism.

N3: depth and sedimentation

In N3, the idea of sedimentation of the perceived gains stronger support, provided that “sedimentation” does not mean copying.

Brodt and colleagues describe coordination among hippocampal replay, sharp-wave ripples, thalamic spindles, and neocortical slow oscillations during memory consolidation and transformation in sleep. Representations initially dependent on the hippocampus may participate in the formation of more distributed and schema-like cortical representations.

What was lived may remain precisely because it changes. Some details weaken, relationships are reorganized, and regularities may gain weight.

Sediment is not a photograph of the territory. Sediment modifies the terrain that will receive the next event.

And what is reorganized never happened only in the cortex. There was skin, posture, breathing, temperature, space, and metabolism. Neural tissue and epidermis share an ectodermal origin before following distinct developmental pathways, without this making them equivalent. The skin itself also contains forms of immune memory, such as tissue-resident memory T cells — something entirely different from episodic memory, but another example of how previous events can continue to participate materially in an organism.

We are Body-Territory.

The path is not a staircase

We also need to correct another intuitive image.

A sleep cycle is not simply:

N1 → N2 → N3 → REM.

In typical adult sleep architecture, we may move through something closer to N1 → N2 → N3 → N2 → REM, repeating cycles throughout the night while the proportion of each stage changes.

Transition does not have to be a straight line.

And REM itself is not homogeneous.

Tonic and phasic REM: APUS and Tekoha in another configuration

REM sleep contains tonic and phasic microstructure. Tonic REM refers broadly to intervals without bursts of rapid eye movements, while phasic REM includes these bursts. They should not be imagined as two fixed steps of a staircase; they alternate within REM.

In 2025, intracranial recordings from 31 patients revealed differences in spectral power and connectivity between tonic and phasic REM.

Then, in 2026, Cataldi and colleagues produced a result that is especially provocative for our APUS/Tekoha framework. They compared brain responses to external sounds with responses related to participants’ own heartbeats.

Auditory responses decreased from wakefulness to tonic REM and became even more attenuated during phasic REM. Heartbeat-related responses, however, remained present during REM and were stronger than during wakefulness. The balance between exteroceptive and interoceptive processing shifted progressively, with tonic REM in an intermediate position and phasic REM showing the strongest relative shift toward cardiac signals.

This does not prove:

tonic REM = APUS

or

phasic REM = Tekoha.

That would be exactly the kind of conceptual local optimum we have been trying to avoid.

But it allows new questions.

During tonic REM, we can investigate whether relatively continuous spatial configurations help sustain a dream APUS: Where am I? From where am I perceiving? Who is close to me? What distance separates us?

Research on dream reports shows that visual perspective, interpersonal distance, and self-location continue to organize dream experience. In a 2023 study involving 530 participants, first-person perspective predominated, while distance between the dream self and other characters showed measurable spatial organization.

In phasic REM, a different question appears:

Does Tekoha become more plastic precisely when certain forms of information from the external territory receive less relative weight?

And here lies our boldest hypothesis.

Perhaps, in some dreams, we do not merely perceive a body or a territory. We may experience ourselves as being the bodily configuration we are perceiving.

This has not been demonstrated as a specific function of phasic REM. But now it can be tested.

Participants could be awakened separately from tonic and phasic REM while EEG, EOG, ECG, and respiration are recorded, and immediately asked about self-location, perspective, distance, body ownership, and identification with the body or character experienced in the dream.

We are not claiming that we have found Tekoha in phasic REM.

We are asking whether something shareable and measurable exists behind this experience.

Crossing and returning

The DREAM database, published in 2025, combined twenty datasets, 505 participants, and 2,643 awakenings. It reinforces something essential: conscious experience during sleep does not belong exclusively to REM. There is substantial diversity of mentation across NREM, REM, and the hypnagogic and hypnopompic regions of transition. Among its authors are Brazilian researchers including Kátia Cristine Andrade, Draulio Barros de Araujo, Sérgio Mota-Rolim, and Fernanda Palhano-Fontes.

We may therefore think of sleep, as a BrainLatam hypothesis, as a transformative sedimentation of what was perceived and an exploration of new configurations of the same living reality.

We do not leave materiality. When we close our eyes, the weighting of the visual territory changes. In N1, APUS may become less constrained by the shared immediate environment. In N2, we ask whether Tekoha encounters conditions for reorganization. In N3, the perceived sediments by transforming. In REM, spatial, bodily, and affective configurations can become complete experiences, while tonic and phasic dynamics differently modulate the relationship between external and internal signals.

Then comes hypnopompia.

We open our eyes. The wall once again constrains distance. Gravity reorganizes the “here.” An emotion from the dream may remain for a few moments.

The shared territory regains weight.

But the Body-Territory that wakes has already crossed another history.

Perhaps sleep teaches us every night that consciousness does not need to disappear in order to change configuration profoundly.

We do not leave the Body-Territory. We discover how many configurations a Body-Territory can materially feel.

Commented References - post-2021

Hohaia, W., Saurels, B. W., Johnston, A., et al. (2022). Occipital alpha-band brain waves when the eyes are closed are shaped by ongoing visual processes. Scientific Reports, 12, 1194. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-05289-6.
What this reference represents: it confirms the characteristic increase in occipital alpha with eye closure while showing that this alpha remains related to ongoing visual processes. Closing the eyes does not mean switching off the visual cortex; it means changing its operating regime.

ElShafei, H. A., Orlemann, C., & Haegens, S. (2022). The Impact of Eye Closure on Anticipatory α Activity in a Tactile Discrimination Task. eNeuro, 9(1). DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0412-21.2021.
What this reference represents: it shows that eye closure changes posterior alpha without eliminating alpha organization associated with somatosensory attention. This supports a change in weighting among modalities rather than a simple visual “clearing.”

Hashim, S., & Omigie, D. (2026). Spontaneous visual imagery during extended music listening is associated with reliable alpha suppression. Neuropsychologia, 222, 109346. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2025.109346.
What this reference represents: participants had their eyes closed, yet spontaneous visual imagery was associated with posterior alpha suppression. Visual systems do not simply become “free”; they may be dynamically recruited again when internally generated imagery emerges.

Li, J., Ilina, A., Peach, R., et al. (2025). Falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation dynamic. Nature Neuroscience, 28, 2515–2525. DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-02091-1.
What this reference represents: this is the main foundation for the sleep onset → bifurcation → tipping point axis. The transition into sleep showed bifurcation dynamics and critical slowing down. Transformation may begin before conventional scoring declares that the new state has arrived.

Horowitz, A. H., Esfahany, K., Vega Gálvez, T., et al. (2023). Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance. Scientific Reports, 13, 7319. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-31361-w.
What this reference represents: it connects N1 with the possibility of more distant associations without turning hypnagogia into a mystical category of creativity. The transition appears capable of enabling combinations that stabilized wakefulness makes less available.

Beck, J., Loretz, E., & Rasch, B. (2022). Stress dynamically reduces sleep depth: temporal proximity to the stressor is crucial. Cerebral Cortex, 33(1), 96–113. DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhac055.
What this reference represents: it demonstrates that the effect of stress on sleep depends on temporal position. The Body-Territory carries into sleep not only what has happened, but also the materially present anticipation of what it expects to encounter.

Brodt, S., Inostroza, M., Niethard, N., & Born, J. (2023). Sleep—A brain-state serving systems memory consolidation. Neuron, 111(7), 1050–1075. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2023.03.005.
What this reference represents: it provides the foundation for our metaphor of sedimentation. Replay, ripples, spindles, and slow oscillations participate in memory transformation during sleep. Sedimenting what was perceived is not the same as archiving it unchanged.

Jameson, C., Boulton, K. A., Silove, N., Nanan, R., & Guastella, A. J. (2023). Ectodermal origins of the skin-brain axis: a novel model for the developing brain, inflammation, and neurodevelopmental conditions. Molecular Psychiatry, 28, 108–117. DOI: 10.1038/s41380-022-01829-8.
What this reference represents: it supports the shared ectodermal ancestry of epidermis and neural tissue before their differentiation. It does not make skin and cortex equivalent; it reminds us that brain and bodily boundary belong to the same organismic history.

Liu, G., Wang, Z., & Li, S. (2024). Heterogeneity and plasticity of tissue-resident memory T cells in skin diseases and homeostasis: a review. Frontiers in Immunology, 15, 1378359. DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2024.1378359.
What this reference represents: it shows that the skin contains resident immune memory. This is not autobiographical memory; it is another way in which the past can materially modify the organism’s future response.

Patel, A. K., Reddy, V., Shumway, K. R., & Araujo, J. F. (2024). Physiology, Sleep Stages. StatPearls.
What this reference represents: it provides the basic N1–N2–N3–N2–REM architecture and the EEG characteristics used in our distinctions. Sleep architecture itself shows that crossing the night is not simply descending a linear staircase.

Avigdor, T., Peter-Derex, L., Ho, A., et al. (2025). Spectral and network investigation reveals distinct power and connectivity patterns between phasic and tonic REM sleep. Sleep, 48(8), zsaf133. DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsaf133.
What this reference represents: it provides intracranial evidence of neurophysiological differences between tonic and phasic REM. REM is not a single homogeneous block, although tonic and phasic REM should not be transformed into two rigid, independent stages.

Cataldi, J., Pelentritou, A., Schwartz, S., & De Lucia, M. (2026). Sensory processing reallocation from auditory to cardiac signals in REM sleep. Current Biology, 36(16), 4151–4159.e3. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.07.024.
What this reference represents: this may be the evidence closest to the new APUS/Tekoha hypothesis. The study demonstrates a gradual shift in the balance between external auditory responses and internal cardiac responses from wakefulness to tonic and phasic REM. It does not prove APUS or Tekoha; it makes it experimentally plausible to ask how the relative weight of external and internal signals changes together with the configuration of consciousness.

Erdeniz, B., Tekgün, E., Lenggenhager, B., & Lopez, C. (2023). Visual perspective, distance, and felt presence of others in dreams. Consciousness and Cognition, 113, 103547. DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2023.103547.
What this reference represents: it shows that dreams preserve organization of perspective, interpersonal distance, and spatial self-location. This makes “dream APUS” an investigable hypothesis rather than only a metaphor.

Wong, W., Herzog, R., Andrade, K. C., et al. (2025). A dream EEG and mentation database. Nature Communications, 16, 7495. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-61945-1.
What this reference represents: it combines 20 datasets, 505 participants, and 2,643 awakenings, expanding the study of conscious experience across different moments of sleep. Dreaming and feeling do not belong simply to a single box called REM.

Pereira Jr., A. (2023). Introdução à Metafísica do Monismo de Triplo Aspecto. ANPOF.
What this reference represents: it provides the ontological foundation for avoiding a separation between a “material body” and a “consciousness that travels.” Materiality of the living body, dynamic informational patterns, and sentience are jointly necessary aspects of conscious experience. Three aspects; not three worlds.

BrainLatam (2026). Tekoha y APUS — Interocepción y propiocepción más allá del vocabulario colonial.
What this reference represents: it establishes BrainLatam’s use of Tekoha as the internally felt territory and APUS as the incorporated external territory. The new contribution of this Blog 7 is to transform sleep stages and REM microstructure into an experimental question about how these two dimensions of Body-Territory change in weight, stability, and flexibility across the night.

W40/2026 - Latent Heat, Homeostasis and Metanoia