A stupor is a state in which your mind has stopped working properly — you cannot think clearly, speak clearly, or take in what is around you. You are not asleep and not unconscious; you are somewhere in between, awake but not really there. Most often it follows alcohol or drugs, and the phrase 'a drunken stupor' is so common that many people have only ever met the word inside it: 'He fell into bed in a drunken stupor.' But it also covers other causes — extreme tiredness, illness, high fever, or a shock so heavy that the person goes blank. 'She sat in a stupor for an hour after hearing the news.' In medicine it is a precise term for a level of consciousness between drowsiness and coma, where a patient responds only to strong stimulation like pain. Grammatically, watch the little words: it is nearly always 'in a stupor' or 'into a stupor', and it takes 'a'. Common partners are fall into, sink into, lie in, wake from. There is also a rarer verb 'stupor', but you can safely ignore it — almost nobody uses it, and in real English this word is a noun.