How to Use oneiric in a Sentence

oneiric

adjective
  • There is an oneiric, almost haunting quality to Sarai’s writing that is bolstered by the book’s images.
    — Ana Karina Zatarain, The New Yorker, 24 Feb. 2024
  • Stylistically, these books are often surreal and oneiric, with the gauzy texture of childhood reverie.
    — Becca Rothfeld, New Yorker, 1 June 2026
  • The resulting cinematic dreamscape feels suitably oneiric (a word that pops up in the movie itself), if also more than a little onanistic.
    — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times, 3 Sep. 2022
  • So far, so literal, but there’s something slightly oneiric about this conjunction of slight odd events that places the action in the register of the uncanny.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 9 Jan. 2024
  • Chairs, beds, and bell jars seem to float just in front of the frames, the ghostly 3-D effect rendering her oneiric assemblages more nightmarish than usual.
    — The New Yorker, 31 Mar. 2017
  • Inside are pillowy white segments, oneiric in texture and taste, with notes of pineapple, strawberry, lychee and your most carefree memory of childhood.
    — New York Times, 22 Feb. 2022
  • But some of Wittenberg’s oneiric landscapes have darker undertones, of violence or worry.
    — Grace Edquist, Vogue, 15 Oct. 2025
  • But her oneiric film, lensed by Anton Gromov, is not exactly a comment on the current situation in Europe.
    — Marta Balaga, Variety, 5 Feb. 2022
  • 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, IndieWire, 7 Aug. 2025
  • The show leans heavily into this oneiric space, reminiscent of earlier seasons but with a richer psychological depth.
    — Melissa Fleur Afshar, MSNBC Newsweek, 27 Nov. 2025
  • Ronee Blakley, meanwhile, delivers the film’s most haunting performance as a mother who drinks to forget her role in the vigilante violence that birthed Freddy’s oneiric killing spree.
    — Louis Peitzman, Vulture, 9 Oct. 2025
  • But the series’ greatest drawback is a holdover from the comics themselves — their epic scale unable to be fully conveyed by the narrative itinerancy and the oneiric, plot-dependent logic governing these universes.
    — Inkoo Kang, Washington Post, 5 Aug. 2022
  • Still, these developments have a kind of oneiric logic to them — clearly relevant somehow, floating in loose relation, yet more information in a book that’s exhilaratingly overstuffed with it.
    — Sam Worley, Vulture, 4 Mar. 2025
  • For most this association persisted because the medium was thought to be psychedelic or oneiric, fundamentally unearthly.
    — Will Stephenson, Harper's Magazine, 15 Sep. 2020
  • But for Baumbach, part of the appeal of visualizing White Noise’s oneiric, suburban landscape was rooted in his own effusive memories of the decade during which it was written.
    — Erik Morse, Vogue, 27 Dec. 2022
  • Fans of Haruki Murakami’s melancholy, oneiric tales will also delight in Lim’s assault upon consensus reality.
    — Washington Post, 1 Oct. 2021
  • Fiction acquires the true, tangible qualities of a hallucination while reality becomes somehow an oneiric dimension.
    — Vogue, 12 Sep. 2022
  • Somewhere along the twisty path of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov, our brilliant dreamer-in-chief, came into contact with Dunne’s theories of oneiric prophecy and was evidently inspired by them.
    — Nicholson Baker, New Republic, 21 Feb. 2018
  • The project alternates between details of everyday life—imbued with a surreal, universal quality—and delicate, melancholic landscapes alongside portraits of figures suspended in time, inhabiting their own oneiric world.
    — Caterina De Biasio, Vogue, 24 Sep. 2025
  • Neither of these universes, however, has the oneiric quality of Énard’s previous work, the sense of memory and history and legend blurring together into an enveloping fog in which the connectedness of all things discloses itself.
    — Nicholas Dames, Harpers Magazine, 29 Apr. 2025
  • The winner of the special mention award, Italian Iranian artisan Aghili creates sculptures and installations inspired by Persian culture and oneiric gardens using deadstock yarns.
    — Martino Carrera, Footwear News, 23 Sep. 2025
  • Wary of having to make a film in multiple languages in order to sell to international distributors, Dreyer opted for minimal dialogue, which enhances the unsettling atmosphere evoked by cinematographer Rudolph Maté’s use of oneiric soft focus.
    — Wilson Chapman, IndieWire, 17 Sep. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'oneiric.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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