For several years I’ve been receiving a “Word of the Day” e-mail via Dictionary.com. Some words I already know, some I’ll never have use for, but some are total standouts. One of those that I have especially enjoyed adding to my vocabulary is the word “crapulous.” It’s a perfectly appropriate word, Webster says, and basically it describes how I felt the morning after I drank too much for the first time.
On February 17 of this year I found a second word that has delighted me no end because it described a condition I have long experienced but didn’t really understand. The word is an adjective, “hypnagogic.” Dictionary.com defines it as “Of, pertaining to, or occurring in the state of drowsiness preceding sleep".
I have long asked myself how I can be dreaming while I am still awake. Sometimes when I take a nap in the afternoon I can lie on my bed for an hour and not move a muscle, but I am not yet asleep. I keep waiting to fall asleep but at the very same time I also am having dream-like scenes playing out in my mind. Without moving a muscle I can figure out that I must be asleep because my rational mind wouldn’t be thinking the scenario that is going on in my head while I am lying there. But if I were asleep I wouldn’t be analyzing why I am not asleep. As you can imagine, experiencing that state has been such a puzzle to me.
I can wake up in the middle of the night from a dream and then decide whether or not I want to go back to that dream or on to something else. While I am deciding, I have already slipped back into the dream but I am not yet asleep because I am also wondering where the cat is and what time it is and if I really want to continue the dream.
Dictionary.com says I am in a hypnagogic state. I am so delighted to know that, even though I know it sounds a little weird. But learning this word means that I now know what is going on, and I now know that I am not the only one it happens to. Otherwise, there would be no word for it, right?
Sometimes I lie down in bed at night and as I relax I begin thinking of, and then seeing, certain regular images that come again and again in my dreams, nothing that I have ever seen before in real life, but always a certain swimming pool, a certain house built in the round, a certain house I live in that is getting ready to collapse into the basement, a certain pattern of lights that in my “dream” I know are in Manitou Springs at night -- these images are like old friends and each has appeared enough times in my dreams that I can call them up without being asleep. Amazing! All this time I’ve been having a hypnagogic adventure and didn’t know it!
It’s nice to find out that one of my oddities is perfectly normal and natural. I don’t talk about this “condition” because it actually seems a little bizarre, but I can’t deny it either. Dictionary.com illustrates the word in a bit from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s story “The Faces of Night, Many of Them Scary” as published in the New York Times, January 9, 1995: “the phenomenon of hypnagogic hallucinations, or what Mr. Alvarez describes as ‘the flickering images and voices that well up just before sleep takes over.’”
And I have to say “YES! THAT’S IT!”
But I’m truly not crazy.
No comments:
Post a Comment