dreamchildren

The dream-children whom I would now raise, if I could, before every one of you, according to your various circumstances, should be the dear child you love, the dearer child you have lost, the child you might have had, the child you certainly have been. Each of these dream-children should hold in its powerful hand one of the little children now lying in the Child’s Hospital, or now shut out of it to perish. Each of these dream-children should say to you, “O, help this little suppliant in my name; O, help it for my sake!”

1858, Charles Dickens, Speech in the Freemasons’ Hall in London following the proposal of a toast to “Prosperity to the Hospital for Sick Children”, closing paragraph

[…] met winter muses, unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway, instead of the Shelleyan dreamchildren with whom he had regaled their expectant appreciation.

1996, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, page 79

Perhaps some of the dreamchildren and vision-children who never show up in this reality are members of other families that we love and belong to, elsewhere.

2002, Elisabeth Hallett, Stories of the Unborn Soul: The Mystery and Delight of Pre-birth Communication, page 260

Dreamchildren are not only imaginary child characters who dream; they also tend to be fantasized about by the authors of the stories in which they appear.

2004: Amy Christine Billone, The Boy Who Lived: From Carroll’s Alice and Barrie’s Peter Pan to Rowling’s Harry Potter, pUnknown (pp178–202)