reverie
/ˈrɛv(ə)ri
/noun
1A state of being pleasantly lost in one’s thoughts; a daydream: a knock on the door broke her reverie [mass noun]: I slipped into reverie...
- My pleasant reverie was broken by Mike tugging at my arm and pleading: ‘Can I have a bike, Dad, please?’
- The laughter of my children finally broke my reverie.
- Trains however, sway gently through the landscape and lull one into a pleasant reverie.
Synonyms
daydream, daydreaming, trance, fantasy, vision, fancy, hallucination, musing;
inattention, inattentiveness, wool-gathering, preoccupation, obliviousness, engrossment, absorption, self-absorption, absent-mindedness, abstraction, lack of concentration, lack of application;
Scottish dwam
1.1 Music An instrumental piece suggesting a dreamy or musing state: his own compositions can move from impressionist reveries to an orchestral chordal approach...
- The album splits between twisted, skewed rock anthems and eerie reveries such as the whispery ‘Someone's in the Wolf’.
- Sal describes the jazz reverie of the pianist, Slim Galliard.
- Certainly the singer could hardly make a bigger contrast with the leader's light-footed oud playing or Mirabassi's clarinet reveries, at times hardly seeming to disturb the air.
1.2 archaic A fanciful or impractical idea or theory: he defended and explained all the reveries of astrology...
- Yet there is also no denying the fact that most of these fancy reveries were introduced into China quite late, since the 1930s.
- We now take a more cynical, or at least a more bemused, view of such analogistic reveries, for we recognize that the cosmos, in all its grandness, does not exist for us or as a mirror of our centrality in the scheme of universal things.
- Which brought me again to my whole reverie about steel: As much as we prize things in this culture, we do not much fetishize the process by which they were made.
Origin
Early 17th century: from obsolete French resverie, from Old French reverie 'rejoicing, revelry', from rever 'be delirious', of unknown ultimate origin.