The phrase "dormant desire" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a feeling that has been suppressed and is waiting to be awakened. For example: "John had a dormant desire to travel, but he had never been able to make it a reality."
But it also unveiled a dormant desire for spiritual connection – this, together with the discovery that analysis fuelled my unhelpful tendency to ruminate down intellectual cul-de-sacs, led naturally to meditation as a complement.
It's hard to know what exactly it is about the book that seems to ignite otherwise dormant desire — is it the particular outlines of the story, the rough way that Christian, the male protagonist, controls and seduces the book's heroine, Anastasia?
What you are seeing with Habayit Hayehudi [Jewish Home] is a dormant desire to restore Jewish values to Israel being uncovered, exploding". Danny Danon, another extreme rightwinger rising in the political firmament, in his case within the ruling Likud party, describes it is an "awakening".
But there's a chance that it wasn't just the joke that caught on with people – it may have also tapped into users' dormant desire for a more dating-focused layer to Facebook.
That dormant desire for acceptance gets cultivated into full blown beliefs, usually inherited and taught to us.
When men do appear on the scene, whether in the form of a babe-chasing player like Jack Nicholson's Harry or Alec Baldwin's renewedly impassioned Jake (or Dennis Quaid's Nick Parker in "The Parent Trap," for that matter), they awaken dormant desires that nevertheless have to be fit into pre-existing, busy lives.
My visit to the smoke-easy had the unexpected side effect of awakening my long-dormant desire to do standup, a bucket-list experience I've so far avoided largely due to the omnipresent threat of drunken heckling.
My disco desires lay dormant for years after that first brush with the coked-up perfection of disco at its most rottenly commercially-minded, and microhouse and minimal techno took hold.
I sent out another round of emails, this time grounding my interest more specifically in the desire to "awaken dormant abilities in my mind and psyche".
Anything that creates a spark of curiosity within us or generates some desire that typically lays dormant within our familiar days, is often our intuition guiding us to say yes (or at least to learn more).
"The armed forces are just seizing an opportunity to revive a program that has long been desired but long lain dormant," Egon Heck, executive secretary of the Indigenous Missionary Council, a Roman Catholic church group, said in an interview in Brasília, the capital.
