LD4all is an international community with members who speak many different languages. I was recently thinking about languages and wondered something. In English, “dream” can refer to the things we see while sleeping (“I had a crazy dream last night!”) as well as our goals and aspirations (“I have a dream…”). I was wondering if any other languages use their word for “dream” in the same way or if there are other definitions.
So why not share how to say “dream” in any languages you speak or are trying to learn? And specify if the word has any other definitions or if there are multiple words for “dream” or anything else interesting?!
So, I’ll go first! I’m learning Japanese in school right now! The Japanese word for dream is 夢 (ゆめ) (“yume”) and it actually maps out to the English word “dream” pretty well. It can mean both the things we see at night while sleeping and aspirations. I’m not sure if this is due to Western influence or if the word has always been like that. According to various internet sources which may or may not be Google Translate, the term for “lucid dream” in Japanese is 明晰夢 (めいせきむ) (“meisekimu”). I’m not sure if there are any other terms or not.
En español, dicimos «soñar» y lo usamos casi lo mismo como en ingles. Or… to put that in another language… In Spanish we say “soñar” and we use it almost the same as in English. “Lucid dreams” would be “sueños lucidos”.
So… yea… I look forwards to seeing what other languages people put up here.
In Brazil, we speak portuguese and we call it “sonho”. It has the same meaning that in english( althought there is a candy called sonho, a little cake with cream of nobodyknowswhat-flavor )
In German we use the word “Traum” for dream, which can also mean both the experience at night and aspirations or hopes/wishes. I wouldn’t be surprised though if the term is also used in English or other languages when a lot of terms in psychology were coined by Germans^^
A lucid dream is a “Klartraum”, which literally means “clear dream”, but could of course also mean vivid dream or lucid dream It is however a single noun in German, no adjective+noun combination.
Also, wiki also lists the lucid dream as 明晰夢, however it uses a different reading for 夢: meiseki-mu. I’ve also read it up in some other source a while ago but I don’t remember what term they used. However, I am quite sure it had 明 in it
dream: san
to dream: sanjati (pronounced sanyati)
I am dreaming: Ja sanjam
lucid dreaming/lucid dreams: lucidno sanjanje/lucidni snovi (pronounced lutsid-)
dreamer: sanjar
dream journal: dnevnik snova
to sleep: spavati
nightmare: košmar (koshmar), or noćna mora (literally night mare)
daydreaming: sanjarenje
to daydream: sanjariti
San can mean both dreaming during sleep and someone’s aspirations.
In Tagalog, dream is “panaginip” (with a soft G and long I). There’s even a word for Old Hag Syndrome, “bangungot” (both ng’s are pronounced together, like the end of an English gerund.)
I heard in Japanese the sleep paralysis phenomenon is “kanashibari” and traditionally involves a ghost rather than an old hag.
What I’m really curious about is the etymology of the Australian Aborigines words that get translated into “dreaming”. I’ve read that Aboriginal “Dreaming” refers to territories, mythology, and rituals…but do they also refer to the stuff that they see when they sleep? Or did some colonialists just think that calling tribal practices “dreamings” was more poetic?
Actually, the term “Dreaming” in that cased is used as a synonym for the more Anglicised “Dreamtime”. It’s completely different from the Aboriginals actual terms for dreaming. It’s hard to say what the word is for Aboriginals, since there is a load of actual languages, differing from each tribe. Wiki says “The term “Dreaming” is directly based on the term Altjira (Alchera), the name of a spirit or entity in the mythology of the Aranda [tribe].”
Ah, thank you! That cleared things up a lot. I followed some Wiki links, they’ve been updated so much since the last time I looked up Dreamtime, and apparently a man named William Edward Hanley Stanner translated altjira or alcheringa from an Aranda language into Dreamtime…which might have been a mistranslation, and nothing to do with hallucinations during sleep at all. This also explains why, when I got to read an actual anthropological ethnography (Daughters of the Dreaming by Diane Bell, focused on the Walpiri and Katej), there were a lot of references to Dreamtime or Dreaming as mythological and ritual and ancestral and territorial…and maybe only once did the word refer to a significant dream that somebody had when they slept, specifically because of a sort of a curse that somebody else did them. Unfortunately, the original word for that wasn’t included, it was just glossed as Dreaming, which I guess anthropologists are going to continue to use.
I’ve got to catch up on the rest of this show one day.
And to go further, we can explain that (in French as in English) We use “rêver” to talk about our dreams for our future life for example.
“J’ai toujours rêvé de faire des rêves lucides !”
"I have always wanted to make lucid dreams ! "
The similarities between these two languages are big.
In Norway, we have two official “dialects”, and the Sami culture is partly autonomous.
In Norwegian Bokmål it is en drøm (s), å drømme (v), bevisst drøm = lucid dream.
In Norwegian Nynorsk it is ein draum, å draume, and lucid dream doesn’t seem to have a term.
I don’t know the word in Sami.
The etymology of “dream” seem to be the same for English, Frisian, Old Norse and German, that is stemming from Proto-Germanic “draumaz, draugmaz”: “festivity, dream, ghost, hallucination, delusion, deception". (wordnik.com) I think it’s especially interesting that in Old Irish roots, the word has to do with a “party or group of people”, as I think dreams often reflect many characters, known and unknown in RL.
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I followed some Wiki links, they’ve been updated so much since the last time I looked up Dreamtime, and apparently a man named William Edward Hanley Stanner translated 
