Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Hypnagogic
/ˌhɪpnəˈɡɒdʒɪk/adjective
Belonging to the drifting state between waking and sleep, where images and voices arrive unbidden.
The Greek roots
ὕπνος
hýpnos
sleep
ἀγωγός
agōgós
leading, bringing
Literally: “leading into sleep”
The story of the word
Alfred Maury coined the French hypnagogique in the 1840s after keeping notes on his own falling asleep, waking himself deliberately to catch what his mind had just produced. There is a mirror term, hypnopompic, for the state on the way out of sleep, built with πομπή, a sending away. Hypnos was a god with a brother named Thanatos, which tells you how the Greeks ranked the family resemblance.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
hypnosisinsomniapedagoguedemagogue
In a sentence
The whole tune arrived in a hypnagogic flash, and by morning he had lost half of it.