Once again, we turn to some of the marvelous and obscure language contained in Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama that baffled our poor copy-editor.

hypnagogic: Of or relating to the state immediately before falling asleep.

The word combines the Greek words for “sleep” and “abduction.” This time we will let Mr. Valtat himself describe his thoughts on the intoxicating vocabulary of Aurorarama:

I learned that word from that same very good friend, who wrote a short story called “hypnagogy”. It refers to the absurdist, surrealistic images one sees when falling asleep and that are nearly impossible to remember. It seems that at times, Gabriel d’Allier, Brentford Orsini’s unreliable sidekick, sees this as his normal state of consciousness. The most famous hypnagogic (or more precisely hypnopompic) literary sentence must be Proust’s “Deer, deer, Francis Jammes (a forgotten poet), fork!”