So goes a line from an old Blondie song — you could translate it as можно видеть сны бесплатно (“one pays nothing to dream”).

And “dreams” are the theme for today, because позавчера мне снился странный-престранный сон. (“The day before yesterday I had an oh-so-strange dream.”) Although maybe кошмар, “nightmare,” would be more apt!

Во сне я видел, как агентство «NASA» собиралось запустить космический корабль с сотнями пассажиров на дальнюю звёздную систему. (“I dreamt that NASA was preparing to launch a spaceship with hundreds of passengers to a distant star system.”)

For some reason, they plotted the ship’s trajectory not with state-of-the-art computers, but with an огромный оррерий (“an enormous orrery”) made out of Legos — a weird detail that’s very characteristic of my own dreams. Я нередко вижу сны о сложных часовых механизмах с бесчисленными шестернями. (“I rather often dream about elaborate clockwork mechanisms with countless gears.”)

Maybe they should’ve used computers instead of relying on Legos, because something went terribly wrong in the mission: Корабль неожиданно вернулся на Землю (“The ship unexpectedly returned to Earth”), почти все пассажиры вместе с экипажем исчезли неизвестным способом (“almost all the passengers, along with the crew, had mysteriously vanished”), и остался лишь десяток трупов, заражённых какими-то типа инопланетными паразитами (“and there remained only about ten corpses, infected with some sort of extra-terrestrial parasites”).

And this was just the beginning of a long and meandering dream. It soon became evident that the spaceship’s faster-than-light warp engine had accidentally opened a hole into an адское измерение (“hell-dimension”) — as in the Doom computer games — and things took a rather Lovecraftian turn. At one point, I was being chased by a huge and hungry reptile-spider with a plastic, Barbie-like face.

But then, without warning or fanfare, the dream turned “lucid” — which is to say that мне вдруг стало вполне понятно, что чудовище и всё остальлное только снятся (“I suddenly fully understood that the monster and everything else were only part of a dream.”)

And I thought to myself, “if this is a dream, why shouldn’t I have superhuman abilities like flying and telekinesis?” I mean, во сне, всё что угодно — возможно (“in a dream, anything you like is possible”). И едва я это придумал, как я приобрёл суперспособности! (“And no sooner had I thought of this, than I acquired super-powers!”)

Which was bad news for my opponent, as you might imagine — просто мне было махнуть рукой, чтобы повалить чудовища с ног (“I merely had to wave my hand to knock the monster off his feet.”)

And that, I swear, was maybe only about halfway through my weird dream, but enough about that! Anyway, there are various ways that “to dream” can be expressed in Russian, as I did in explaining my dream.

The basic imperfective verb is сниться. (As an etymological note, don’t confuse сниться with the similar-looking but unrelated сниматься/сняться, which can mean “to come loose and fall off.” In that verb, the с- is really a motion-prefix and not part of the main root, but in сниться, the с- belongs to the root с(о)н-.) Anyway, it conjugates as follows:

сниться
Past	снился, снилась, снилось, снились
	sing.	pl.
1st	снюсь	снимся
2nd	снишься	снитесь
3rd	снится	снятся
Imperative	сни(те)сь!

And the perfective присниться conjugates exactly the same way.

But here’s the part that can be confusing: this verb pair doesn’t mean “to have a dream about”; it means “to appear to someone in a dream,” with the “someone” who is having the dream expressed in the dative (кому-нибудь). Thus, я снюсь ему is NOT “I’m dreaming about him,” but “He’s dreaming about me,” or more literally “I am appearing to him in a dream.” To put it another way, the nominative subject of (при)сниться is not the dreamer, but the characters and objects within the dream, or the сон (“dream”) itself. And, quite often, the verb may be used impersonally in the 3rd person singular (neuter past), without a nominative subject at all. So you can say:

Ей снился покойный дедушка.
She was dreaming about her late/deceased grandfather.

«Вам очень часто снятся сны об акулах?» — спросила ЭЛИЗА.
“Do you very often dream dreams about sharks?” — asked ELIZA.

Однажды приснилось, что мы с тобой вальсируем…
♪♫ “I waltzed with you once upon a dream…” ♪♫

Instead of сниться, you can also use the expression видеть сон о ком-н./чём-н., “to see a dream about someone/something,” or you can rearrange this grammatically and say видеть кого-н./что-н. во сне, “to see someone/something in a dream,” or “in one’s sleep.”

Which brings us to the point that the noun сон (gen. сна) doesn’t only mean “a dream”; it’s also “sleep”. And, correspondingly, сниться and видеть сон cannot refer to “dreams” that you have while awake. For instance, you can’t translate Martin Luther King’s words “I have a dream…” with Мне снилось…, because he wasn’t talking about a vision that came to him during REM sleep!

Instead, you can use the verb мечтать with the meaning “to have a dream while awake” — in fact, this word used in Russian translations of MLK’s speech:

Я мечтаю, что придёт день, когда [все] будут судимы не по цвету их кожи…
“I dream, that a day will come, when [everyone] will be judged not by the color of their skin…”

Here, мечтать signifies “to have deep hopes for the future,” but in other contexts it suggests “to fantasize” or “to daydream” or “to wish for” in a more trivial and frivolous way:

«Всё, о чём ты мечтаешь, я исполню, только скажи слово» — обещал джинн Алладину.
“Just say the word and I’ll fulfill everything that you daydream about” — the genie promised Alladin.

This range of meaning from profound to fairytale-ish is also found in the derived noun мечта and its synonym мечтание. King’s immortal speech is called «У меня есть мечта», but Alladin might respond to the genie: «Наконец, мои мечты сбываются!» (“Finally, my fantasies are coming true!”)

And, finally, as a little point of trivia: the common phrase «голубая мечта» — lit., “light-blue daydream” — might nowadays be (mis)understood as “a gay-male daydream.” But historically, the meaning was more like “a starry-eyed, pie-in-the-sky, unrealistic daydream”, and the phrase can still be used in this sense. (Though to say “pie-in-the-sky fantasy” without any double-entendre, you can say «лазурная мечта», “azure daydream,” instead!)