When you’re just waking up, you’re often in a unique mental state. You’re still half asleep, and whatever nutty thing you were just dreaming about is starting to slip away, but for a little while it still makes a kind of sense.
There’s also a mental state you might enter as you fall asleep; you’re no longer really alert, but you’re still aware of things around you. They just gradually matter less and less as you ease into sleep.
These states have names: beginning to wake up is “hypnopompic,” and the opposite one is “hypnagogic.” “Hypno” comes from the Greek word for sleep, “hypnos.” “Pompic” comes from “pompe,” sending away, and “gogic” is from “agogos,” leading the way. “Hypnopompic” was coined by Frederic Myers in the early years of the 20th century. He was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, which is just what it sounds like — paranormal researchers. According to Eric Dingwall, who was an anthropologist and also a member, “the primary aim of the society was not objective experimentation but the establishment of telepathy.”
“Hypnagogic” is a bit older, and borrowed from French, which is why it has the unusual (for English) beginning “hypna-.” It was coined around 1886 by Alfred Maury, a French doctor who researched dreams in the 1800s. His work was mentioned by Sigmund Freud, and one of the dreams he reported on became the basis of one of Salvador Dali’s paintings.
Maury wrote about “hypnagogic hallucinations,” which are experiences during these half-asleep states that seem completely real to the people going through them. But of course, when you wake up, either minutes later (if you were hypnopompic) or after a good rest (hypnagogic), you realize they didn’t really happen. Usually. As for waking up after finding yourself reading about words like “hypnopompic” and “hypnagogic,” the jury is still out.
