Anemoia, a coinage from the writer John Koenig – author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – refers to a feeling of nostalgia for a time one didn’t live through. I previously wrote about why this feeling arises, namely, by connecting it to Daniel Laidler’s concept of hagioptasia: the tendency to project ‘specialness’ onto certain aspects…
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One night last week, as I was falling asleep, in my head I told myself – as I’ve done before – I don’t want to have weird or bad dreams, I want to have fun dreams. I’ve done this as my intention before going to sleep, as I’ve kind of convinced myself that this intention-setting does…
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In my last post on hagioptasia, I touched on how this tendency to project an aura of specialness onto things manifests itself in dreams. It is hagioptasia that makes dream scenarios, on the one hand, carry an atmosphere of magic and sentimentalism, but it also, on the other hand, makes them somewhat painful. Assuming one…
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Hagioptasia is a term coined by musician Daniel Laidler, which he says represents “a fundamental human perceptual tendency to experience an illusory sense of extraordinary ‘specialness’ in various aspects of life.” These aspects of life include music, religious and sacred objects, art, status and glamour, and nostalgia. I wrote about expressions of hagioptasia in emo…
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I recently came across the term hagioptasia, coined by musician Daniel Laidler. It refers to a fleeting sense of significance and specialness, which eludes explanation. Laidler describes this experience, and how it’s a core part of nostalgia, in a blog post published last December. He challenges the commonplace notion that nostalgia is merely a sentimental…
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