Dreamchildren

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈdɹim.t͡ʃɪld.ɹən/

Definitions

1. A blend of ideals and expectations, often formed from imaginative visions of future offspring
2. Reflections of hopes and desires for what a perfect family might embody, illustrated through fantasy
3. Symbolic representations of aspirations linked to parenthood and the envisioned qualities of children in one's dreams

Etymology: Charles Lamb's essay "Dream-Children: A Reverie" gave the idea its most famous form. In it, the narrator tells two young children, Alice and John, stories about their grandmother's house and the great-grandfather they have never known, then realises that the children he is describing exist only in his imagination and in the memory of a family that is gone. The essay's title uses the hyphenated "dream-children," and the closed spelling "dreamchildren" follows the same pattern. The word is a plain compound of "dream" and "child," with the plural "children," and needs no special derivation. Its meaning has since shifted from children imagined or remembered in a reverie to the ideal children a person pictures before having any, which is the sense given in the definition you provided.