dreams

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of dream.

   His dreams that week kept returning to the same empty house.

   Many young athletes hold onto dreams of competing in the Olympics.

   Note

   The plural covers every countable meaning of the noun: the visions of a night's sleep, the hopes a person carries, and the wild schemes or idle fancies that others dismiss. One use does not take a plural. DREAM, the US acronym for development, relief, and education for alien minors, is uncountable. It names one program and is not pluralized.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of dream.

   Whenever the city grows quiet, she dreams of the seaside town where she grew up.

   The boy dreams every night of the dog his family lost last spring.

   Note

   The -s form serves every use of the verb, and most of them are intransitive: she dreams, she dreams of home. With of, it can also mean entertaining a possibility, as in he never dreams of quitting. Used transitively, it takes the imagined experience as its object (she dreams the same scene each night). The spelling is shared with the plural noun, so the surrounding words show which is meant: his dreams, but he dreams.

Showing meanings only. Show all 2