Other forms: dreams, dreaming, dreamed, dreamt
To dream is to see pictures and stories in your head while asleep. Dream about it, I dreamed of her, sweet dreams.
The past tense is dreamed or dreamt, both correct, with dreamt commoner in Britain. It also means to hope for something: dream of being a pilot, a dream job, in your dreams. Dream up means to invent. Note daydream; a dream come true; wouldn't dream of it, meaning a firm refusal; and that most dreaming happens in REM sleep, of which people get about two hours a night.
1verbdreamTo see pictures and stories in your head while asleep.~39%
“She dreamed about that house for about thirty years.”
2verbhopeTo hope for something.~2%
“He dreamed of being a pilot and became an excellent mechanic.”
3nounseeWhat you see while asleep, or a hope.~59%
“Last night I had a strange dream that I could fly.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
dream is a sleeping vision or a hope.
Old English dream meant joy, music and noise — not sleep at all. The sleeping sense probably came from Old Norse draumr, and the two words merged, which is why the Old English poems talk about the dream of the hall and mean the singing.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰrewgʰ-
Middle English
drem
English, today
dream
Built from
From Middle English drem. From Middle English dream, dreem, dreeme, drem, dreme, dræm, from Old English drēam, drēm, drīm (“joy; melody, music; frenzy”), from Proto-West Germanic draum, from Proto-Germanic draumaz (“dream”), from earlier draugmaz, from Proto-Indo-European dʰrowgʰ-mos, from dʰrewgʰ- (“to deceive”). The sense of "dream", though not attested in Old English, may still have been present (compare Old Saxon drōm (“bustle, revelry, jubilation", also "dream”)), and was undoubtedly reinforced later in Middle English by Old Norse draumr (“dream”), from same Proto-Germanic root.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA