wet dream

English

Pronunciation

  • (file)

Noun

wet dream (plural wet dreams)

  1. An erotic dream bringing the sleeper to orgasm.
    • 1985, David Lewis, "British playwright makes a mountain out of a Mole" (review of The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend), The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 9 Jan., page E22:
      His mother is having an affair with the man next door, is reading Germain Greer's The Female Eunuch—which spawns Adrian's first wet dream.
  2. (idiomatic) The orgasm in such a dream.
  3. (idiomatic, by extension) An exciting fantasy; a very appealing, ideal thing, person, or state of affairs.
    • 1986 October 24, Liam Lacey, “Same old irresistible Seeger”, in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, page D11:
      Bruce Springsteen may become middle America's wet dream.
    • 2007, Addy Dugdale, "Betavoltaic Battery Could Power Your Laptop for Thirty Years," gizmodo.com, 2 Oct:
      The plan is, if all goes well, to have these batteries, an eco warrior's wet dream due to their non-toxicity, on sale in two or three years.

Synonyms

Translations

Verb

wet dream (third-person singular simple present wet dreams, present participle wet dreaming, simple past and past participle wet dreamed or wet dreamt)

  1. (intransitive) To produce fluids from the sex organs as a result of sexual arousal during sleep; to have an erotic dream; (figurative) to fantasize (about something, especially in a sexual way).
    • 1962 [1959], William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, New York: Grove Press, page 99:
      He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells, []
    • 1978, Larry Kramer, Faggots, New York: Warner Books, published 1979, page 85:
      [] he’d been wet dreaming for several months about such an opportunity as was obviously creeping up on both of them,
    • 1997, Nik Cohn, Need, New York: Knopf, page 137:
      That was the only sex she had ever wet-dreamed about.
    • 2005, Tyehimba Jess, Leadbelly, Amherst, MA: Verse Press, p. 33,
      you is more a man than they ever wet dreamed to be
  2. (transitive) To have an erotic dream about (someone or something); (figurative) to fantasize about (someone or something) sexually.
    • 1967, Angus Wilson, No Laughing Matter, New York: Viking, Book 4, p. 136:
      [] the Bakst drawings imposed themselves on the shadowy sultans, sultanas, eunuchs, and pages [] the pageboy of the Fairy Cherry in panniered skirt and cherry-tree headdress―the very same he had dreamed, wet dreamed no doubt as well, pressed down, hemmed in by his wooden box.
    • 2010, Paul Burman, The Grease Monkey’s Tale, London: PaperBooks, Part 1, Chapter 12, p. 71:
      [] she left so few traces of having ever existed at all that he began to wonder whether he hadn’t just wet-dreamt her into being.
    • 2013, Rachel Kushner, chapter 11, in The Flamethrowers, New York: Scribner, page 163:
      A rebel is a gleaming individual in tight Levi’s, a sneering and pretty face. The kind Sal Mineo wet-dreams.

References

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