DREAMER

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does dreamer mean? 

• DREAMER (noun)
  The noun DREAMER has 3 senses:

1. someone who is dreaming

2. someone guided more by ideals than by practical considerations

3. a person who escapes into a world of fantasy

  Familiarity information: DREAMER used as a noun is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• DREAMER (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Someone who is dreaming

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Hypernyms ("dreamer" is a kind of...):

sleeper; slumberer (a rester who is sleeping)

Derivation:

dream (experience while sleeping)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Someone guided more by ideals than by practical considerations

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

dreamer; idealist

Hypernyms ("dreamer" is a kind of...):

visionary (a person given to fanciful speculations and enthusiasms with little regard for what is actually possible)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "dreamer"):

Don Quixote (any impractical idealist (after Cervantes' hero))

romantic (a soulful or amorous idealist)

Derivation:

dream (have a daydream; indulge in a fantasy)

Sense 3

Meaning:

A person who escapes into a world of fantasy

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

dreamer; escapist; wishful thinker

Hypernyms ("dreamer" is a kind of...):

daydreamer; woolgatherer (someone who indulges in idle or absentminded daydreaming)

Derivation:

dream (have a daydream; indulge in a fantasy)

 Context examples 

A very different Holmes, this active, alert man, from the introspective and pallid dreamer of Baker Street.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Emma, you are a great dreamer, I think?

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford—a man who sits in an even higher place than you, Judge Blount—has said that Spencer will be dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather than a thinker.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

His voice, more and more faltering in the utterance of these words, stopped for a few moments; then he went on: Once awakened from my dream—I have been a poor dreamer, in one way or other, all my life—I see how natural it is that she should have some regretful feeling towards her old companion and her equal.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

How proper Mr. Tilney might be as a dreamer or a lover had not yet perhaps entered Mr. Allen's head, but that he was not objectionable as a common acquaintance for his young charge he was on inquiry satisfied; for he had early in the evening taken pains to know who her partner was, and had been assured of Mr. Tilney's being a clergyman, and of a very respectable family in Gloucestershire.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

He looked and then he smiled, as he could not well help doing, for it was capitally done, the long, lazy figure on the grass, with listless face, half-shut eyes, and one hand holding a cigar, from which came the little wreath of smoke that encircled the dreamer's head.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

I am a great dreamer.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of the Maeterlinck school—an attack from the citadel of positive science upon the wonder- dreamers, but an attack nevertheless that retained much of beauty and wonder of the sort compatible with ascertained fact.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

I see myself passing on among the novelties of foreign towns, palaces, cathedrals, temples, pictures, castles, tombs, fantastic streets—the old abiding places of History and Fancy—as a dreamer might; bearing my painful load through all, and hardly conscious of the objects as they fade before me.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)