Havelock Ellis on Oneiric Neologism

Thu, Jan 31, 2008

I’ve been going through John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu in preparation for teaching Coleridge this week, and I found an interesting footnote on the aforementioned phenomenon from Havelock Ellis’s The World of Dreams:

There is abundant evidence of the invention of new words in dreams–see, for example, Havelock Ellis’s selvdrolla and jaleisa

Lowes then notes that “Xanadu,” “Abora,” and “Alph” are all perfectly “normal formations, when judged by the semasiology of dreams” (396 n).

“Selvdrolla” seems to be, at least for now, google-less.