Two words from a book I'm reading met with this week's theme: "about sleep".
Hypnagogic: 'of or related to the state just before one is fully asleep'.
Hynopompic: 'of or related to the state before one is really awake'.
Interesting and often amusing moments of subconcious- conciousness, but when I went looking in dictionaries for things related to these words and sleep I wondered about this:

There are two Greek gods of sleep: Hypnos and Morpheus.
One Roman god of sleep: Somnus.
Both Hypnos and Somnus have led to many words related to sleep.
But as far as I could find the only word coming from Morpheus
was morphine as a sedative. Morpheus however has left us many words related to form, formation, changing form.
Maybe there is a simple explanation how this came to be, but I can't find it. If Morpheus came from Greek morphe = form how does it connect to sleep?


Last edited by BranShea; 02/05/2008 7:35 PM.