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Comment by tryauuum | Hacker News Reader

I didn't read the article but I want to ask

How do you even distinguish dreams (plans or visions of future) from dreams (experiences your have while sleeping) in English language? In my mother tongue there are different words for these things

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Context clues, it's rarely an issue in practice for native speakers:

- "I dreamt about you last night" - clearly a sleeping dream

- "I dream of being a doctor" - clearly a future desire

- "It's a dream come true" - ambiguous but the difference isn't important

In my experience there's also a cultural implication/expectation that the different meanings are often intertwined, i.e. desiring something so strongly you have dreams about it.

There are different words in English, too. You yourself have used a few; e.g., "plans". It's just that the standard term for the night hallucination is "dream" and a standard metaphorical use of this term is roughly "ideal future". Generally context is sufficient to determine whether you are using the term literally or metaphorically. If you are determined to make it absolutely clear which use is intended, you can crack open a thesaurus, but when you would want to do this -- in a psychology paper, say -- is precisely when the context is particularly good at disambiguating the two uses.

Context is the only method of which I'm aware. Or expanding, as you did parenthetically.

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