Wednesday Morning Etymology Lesson: Dream

Because I had some vivid ones last night, today’s word is dream, which has a somewhat dissatisfying etymology for traditional linguists, in that the Old English word dream meant “joy, mirth, noisy merriment” and no one can really figure out why in the mid 13th century it came to mean “sleeping vision” instead.  Theories include a borrowing from the Old Norse word draumr which comes from a Proto-Germanic word draugmaz, meaning “festivity, dream, ghost, hallucination, delusion, deception.”  My own personal theory has to do with olde-timey festivals being closely tied with substance imbibing which would likely lead to “sleeping visions,” should one be feeling festive enough.