In March 2025, I posted the following essay on my Patreon:
Last week, I made up a word. It’s a pretty good one.
It’s Oneirogloss or oneiroglossary or oneiroglossic. The middle one may already exist. But I don’t think anyone is going around using it in sentences.
The word serves a function that is not currently being met by existing words. It is rooted in the standard rules of etymology (which are not standard at all). Now, all that’s left is to use the word, define the word, and get other people to use it.
Definition, use, and roots for Oneirogloss
Oneiro – Greek root for “dream”
Glossa – Greek root for “language” “tongue” or idiom.
We could use Latin, some form of lingua somnium. But the need here is for one word that means “the language of dreams, the idiom of the unconscious, as appears in myth and folklore as well as active imagination, shamanic journeys, and dreams at night.”
The reason I want this to be a word is because I’m very tired of typing that same sentence out a million times every time I talk about speaking in the language of the unconscious.
I know the word oneiromancy exists – that’s dream interpretation. And so one would assume that oneiroglossary or a dream dictionary – probably isn’t out of the question. But to speak in oneiroglossic terms, to speak of a story that is in oneirogloss or oneiroglossic language, that’s something I can’t locate in Google or Academia.edu.
I think it’s a valid word. I think I can use it, even if no one else does.
And as my professor in grad school said about his own neologisms, “Sometimes you gotta give them the old Razzle Dazzle.”
I’m Not Sure How to Make Oneiroglossic a Thing
How does someone make a word a word? You use it in a sentence, you define it, you try to write about it. But is anyone using my professor’s made up words? Not that I’m seeing.
They have to be useful words. Is “dream language” clear enough, does it make enough sense in itself? Does it need a word? I want a word for it. But do I need to create that word? Will other scholars of depth psychology use it? Find it helpful?
I will likely have to publish on the usefulness and function of this word, and I’m not even sure how or where to do it.
Playing with Words and Metaphors
I’m in the midst of creating art for an Oracle deck. (See Youtube for more about that). Each card is based on an untranslatable word. A concept that is useful, for which there is only one term in the thesaurus. These words cannot be reduced to simpler words without sentences of description and definition.
I feel like this exercise – creating words, creating cards based on words, on the desire and need for descriptions and words for ideas that I cannot otherwise communicate – this is my work at the moment.
On a trip to Greece, I like to sound out the Greek letters on billboards and signs. I like to see if I can figure out what the words say with my extremely limited Greek vocabulary. I spotted a moving van with a word on it: Metafora. The delight that shivered down to my toes when I learned that metafora means to “carry over” was absolute and perfect.
The metaphor is a moving van of meaning. When we have no way of getting from one idea to the next with the words we have, we bridge them together in a poetic image and carry over the idea that way.
This is why we need poetry. Because sometimes – just sometimes – the dream speaks the metaphor, the metaphor speaks the reality that is inexpressible in any other way.
(This Patreon post continues into another topic – more words that need to be created – but we’re going to stick with Oneiroglossy for now.)
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