Jacob and I both woke up this morning feeling sure that we'd had strange dreams, but unable to remember what they were. This isn't the first time that's happened to me lately, and I was just about to laud the existence of the perfect phrase to describe the feeling when I discovered that I have no such phrase after all.
I was going to say "fugue", which is a word that I fuzzily remember hearing defined as, essentially, a chase. A fugue state, then, would have been a sense of pursuing something. It's elegant and evocative. I took the definition on faith and liked it instantly. Just before using it in this entry, I went to check it and discovered that that isn't it at all. That is not the fugue state of which I speak, and my vocabulary doesn't include a good substitute.
This, then, is what we have. I had dreams last night in which I vaguely remember grasping for something and not quite getting it. I woke up grasping to remember what I was dreaming about and couldn't quite get it. Now I'm grasping, and failing, to describe grasping, and failing, to remember grasping and failing.
Notice to Jacob: I have a feeling this is one of those days where you'll come home and find me eating breakfast in the hope that things will make more sense if I start over.
Posted by dianna at May 27, 2005 11:17 AMin my dream last night, pretty much everyone i know made a fleeting appearance, but the only scene that i actually remembered this morning was kristen sitting cross-legged on the ground eating a candy bar. she looked up at me and it was like a fish eye lens downward on her face so it was really big and sort of creepy looking, and she said, "every girl wants a lollipop." and she looked at her candy bar in disgust and threw it at me. so i tried to fend it off and that's when i woke up with my arms flailing around in the air.
Posted by: michele at May 27, 2005 11:25 AMwow. that sounds like the kind of dream tv writers invent when they are trying to be surrealistic and meaningful, but in a way that tv audiences will be able to grasp.
Posted by: didofoot at May 27, 2005 12:36 PMAren't biscuits with fake-sausage gravy breakfasty enough? It's fake-breakfast-sausage, after all!
Posted by: Jacob at May 27, 2005 01:30 PMOoooh, it is. Also, once the biscuits are split in half and covered in gravy, they will be flat and mostly brown like the buildings in my dream. I think this will be the thing that ties the events of my day together and makes them delicious.
Posted by: Dianna at May 27, 2005 01:40 PMFugue in French can mean flight (as in fleeing), so I also always associate it with pursuit.
Posted by: Katia at May 27, 2005 02:37 PMAha! I feel vindicated by this knowledge. Do you know if the musical term comes from the French?
Posted by: Dianna at May 27, 2005 02:41 PMThe OED says "fugue" is related to French and Italian words - they all relate to the Latin for "to flee". The psychiatric use of "fugue" seems to have more in common with the original Latin than the musical term does, since the musical use seems to primarily concern counterpoint.
The psychiatric term is for a flight from one's own identity, usually to some other desired locality, and it has to do with a dissociative reaction to an emotional state. However, the OED also adds, "On recovery, memory of events during the fugue state is totally repressed but may become conscious under hypnosis or psycho-analysis. A fugue may also be part of an epileptic or hysterical seizure." So I don't think you were horribly misguided there in your word choice.
Posted by: sean at May 27, 2005 06:07 PM