Make Your Point > Archived Issues > HYPNOGOGIC & HYPNOPOMPIC
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Even if today's words are strangers to you, I bet you know some of their cousins, like hypnotic ("causing sleep"), hypnotize ("to put into a sleeplike trance"), and, if you read Brave New World, hypnopedia ("sleep-learning").
"Hypnogogic" has Greek bits that mean "sleep-leading" or "sleep-inducing." It came into English through French around the year 1886. That was when Edmund Gurney, a paranormal enthusiast, published a book called Phantasms Of The Living, in which he described "hypnogogic hallucinations" that people experienced as they were falling asleep. Gurney mused that these hallucinations were "truly the projection of the percipient's own mind as the dream." The word "hypnogogic" has stuck around in the dusty pseudoscientific corners of English, and today, it can mean either "related to falling asleep" or "helping you fall asleep."
Part of speech:
With tongue in cheek!
"[The musician Mike Diaz] knows he's in hypnagogic pop territory and admits as much on his MySpace, listing his influences as 'film scores, the 10th dimension and lucid dreaming.'"
Explain the meanings of "hypnogogic" and "hypnopompic" without saying "awake" or "asleep."
While summarizing different types of brain waves, Steven Kotler noted that theta waves occur "during REM or just before we fall asleep, in that hypnogogic gap where ideas combine in truly radical ways."
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
1.
In one sense, HYPNOGOGIC and HYPNOPOMPIC are opposites. In another sense, they're two sides of the same coin, both referring to _____.
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