oneiric [oh-nahy-rik]

adjective:
of, relating to, or characteristic of dreams

Examples:

Then there's Jake Messing's selection as Best Artist, whose dense and powerful images seem to peer into the oneiric heart of Healdsburg, that dream state between what we think we know and what we can barely imagine. (Best of Arts and Entertainment 2024, The Healdsburg Tribune, November 2024)

Set to a haunting score by the director's brother Giorgi, this melancholic mystery presents Georgia's open plains and mountain regions in alien, oneiric contexts. (Christian Zilko, NYFF Reveals 2025 Currents Lineup, Including New Films by Tsai Ming-liang and Radu Jude, The Guardian, August 2025)

In 'A Boy Named Isamu,' James Yang imagines an ideal, almost oneiric day in the life of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi as a young child. (Sergio Ruzzier, Portraits of Three Artists as Young Children, New York Times, November 2021)

More practically, and from a totally different point of view, M Chabaneix, having studied the continuous subconscious, divides it into nocturnal and waking subconsciousness. If the former be a question of sleep or of the moments preceding sleep, it is oneiric or pre-oneiric. (Remy de Gourmont, Decadence, and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas)

I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me. (Will Self, How I Write)

He is at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure of real oneiric power. (Seamus Heaney, Beowulf)

As George Orr slipped into another oneiric state, the fabric of reality trembled. His dreams, potent and uncontrolled, reshaped the world with each passing thought, blurring the lines between imagination and actuality. (Ursula K Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven)

Origin:

'of or pertaining to dreams', 1859, from Greek oneiros 'a dream' + -ic. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

The notion of using the Greek noun oneiros (meaning 'dream') to form the English adjective oneiric wasn't dreamed up until the mid-19th century. But back in the late 1500s and early 1600s, linguistic dreamers came up with a few oneiros spin-offs, giving English oneirocriticism, oneirocritical, and oneirocritic (each having to do with dream interpreters or dream interpretation). The surge in oneiros derivatives at that time may have been fueled by the interest then among English-speaking scholars in Oneirocritica, a book about dream interpretation by 2nd-century Greek soothsayer Artemidorus Daldianus. In the 17th century, English speakers also melded Greek oneiros with the combining form -mancy ('divination') to create oneiromancy, meaning 'divination by means of dreams'. (Merriam-Webster)