fever dream
Americannoun
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a particularly distressing, scary, or bizarre dream that a person may have when experiencing a fever.
Bedridden with pneumonia, he had a fever dream in which bony old cats were climbing the walls of his room.
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a situation, circumstance, or experience, typically unfavorable, that is odd enough to be likened more to a dream than to reality.
So far, college has felt like a fever dream—ever since I arrived I’ve just felt so out of place.
Etymology
Origin of fever dream
First recorded in 1795–1805
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Cave says, “I sat up in bed and watched it with Bryce’s gorgeous score and fell asleep and had a kind of fever dream with all the images of this extraordinary film, and woke up with the lyrics fully formed, which is extremely unusual for me.”
From Los Angeles Times
It was a fever dream of geopolitical conquest.
From Salon
“It feels like a fever dream.”
From Los Angeles Times
Even “Four Weddings,” in which brides rated one another’s ceremonies on food, dresses and décor, now feels like a kind of collective fever dream.
From Salon
The tender for the mobile cognitive warfare unit reads like a “fever dream” of Chinese military AI ambitions, said Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at CSET.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
