I need my tea before I can be lucid

I had a weird morning. After my wife left for work at 8:30, I never really got back to sleep. I just kept slipping into dreams for a minute or two before jerking awake.

(Not surprisingly, the dreams mostly featured Adam and Jamie from the Mythbusters. As I wrote yesterday, we watched a ton of that show in the past week during my furlough.)

In my confused state, I first wondered if I was lucid dreaming. But I wasn’t, since that requires an awareness that you are dreaming and an ability to control the dream, which I didn’t have. I was just asleep and awake again so fast that it felt like that. Later, I wondered if I was just hallucinating. Some part of my brain that was still functioning wondered if lucid and hallucinate have a common origin.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, lucid means:

• 1. Easily understood; intelligible.
• 2. Mentally sound; sane or rational.
• 3. Translucent or transparent.

And the definition for hallucination:

• 1a. Perception of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory experiences without an external stimulus and with a compelling sense of their reality, usually resulting from a mental disorder or as a response to a drug.
• 1b. The objects or events so perceived.
• 2. A false or mistaken idea; a delusion.

However, I was surprised to find that they do not have a common origin. Both come from Latin, but the AHD says lucid comes from “lūcidus, from lūcēre, meaning to shine,” while hallucinate comes from “hallūcinārī, hallūcināt-, meaning to dream, be deceived; variant of ālūcinārī.” The Online Etymology Dictionary goes further for hallucinate, saying the Latin is “probably from the Greek alyein, from the Attic halyein, meaning be distraught; probably related to alasthai, meaning wander about.”