A dreamscape is the imaginary landscape or setting of a dream. Just like a real landscape has mountains, rivers, and forests, a dreamscape has the strange, shifting scenery that fills your mind while you sleep: impossible staircases, houses with too many rooms, or familiar places that somehow look completely different.

The word combines “dream” and “landscape” to describe how dreams create entire worlds with their own logic and geography. In your dreamscape, you might walk through your school and suddenly find yourself on a beach, or open a closet door and step into a castle. Artists and filmmakers sometimes try to capture dreamscapes in their work, creating surreal scenes that feel like they could only exist in dreams.

Writers and artists also use dreamscape to describe any surreal or fantastical setting that has a dream-like quality, even if it's not literally a dream. A movie might feature dreamscape sequences where reality bends and shifts. The painter Salvador Dalí created famous dreamscapes with melting clocks and strange floating objects, trying to show what the landscape of dreams actually looks like.