dream [ME] Although it corresponds to Dutch droom and German Traum and thus comes from a Germanic root, dream is not recorded in Old English. This may be just luck, or the word may have been borrowed from early Scandinavian. However, although in the main modern sense dream did not appear until the Middle Ages, an earlier dream meaning ‘joy’ and ‘music’ did occur in Old English and may be related. Dreams are often pleasant, sometimes unrealistically so, and numerous popular phrases refer to this. To go like a dream is recorded from the late 19th century in the USA; in your dreams is from the 1970s, also from the USA. The city of dreaming spires is Oxford. The name comes from a line in the poem ‘Thyrsis’ (1866) by Matthew Arnold.