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)

coeval [koh-ee-vuhl]

adjective:
1 of the same age, date, or duration; equally old
2 coincident

Examples:

Their personalities and their pain are made almost exactly coeval, with little telling slippage between. (Vinson Cunningham, The Search for Faith, in Three Plays, The New Yorker, November 2023)

It is the alien with whom we share our planet, a coeval evolutionary life form whose slithery slipperiness and more than the requisite number of limbs (each of which contains its own “brain”) symbolise the dark mystery and fear of the deep. (Philip Hoare, Octlantis: the underwater city built by octopuses, The Guardian, September 2017)

Flipping over the table mats at Chaaye Khana, one pre-empted and anticipated, where the wisdom of tea was already trilled about, Raj coeval writers like Orwell, Johnson and Lewis, heartily drunk on the brew, speaking freely on tea with some Japanese sage opining that “If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty.” (Ramin Khan, Chaaye Khana lives up to its billing, dispelling the affectation of coffee with good, strong tea, The Express Tribune, January 2011)

The inn stood at one end of a small village, in which some of the houses looked so antique that they might, I thought, be coeval with the castle itself. (Catherine Crow, Round the Fire)

Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. (Henry David Thoreau, Walden)

Origin:

'having the same age, having lived for an equal period,' 1620s, from Late Latin coaevus 'of the same age,' from assimilated form of Latin com 'with, together' + aevum 'an age' (from PIE root aiw- 'vital force, life; long life, eternity'). As a noun from c1600. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Coeval comes to English from the Latin word coaevus, meaning 'of the same age.' Coaevus was formed by combining the co- prefix ('in or to the same degree') with Latin aevum ('age' or 'lifetime'). The root aevum is also a base in such temporal words as longevity, medieval, and primeval. Although coeval can technically describe any two or more entities that coexist, it is most typically used to refer to things that have existed together for a very long time (such as galaxies) or that were concurrent with each other in the distant past (parallel historical periods of ancient civilizations, for example). (Merriam-Webster)