This morning I received a letter from a fan telling me she had just watched Netflix’s new series, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and wanted to let me know they were using a term I frequently use in my Haunting Danielle series—dream hopping.

My definition of dream hopping is when a spirt enters your dream. He or she might also pull another spirit or another dreaming person into your dream. I first started using this term in my books back in 2014, when writing The Ghost Who Wasn’t, which was published early 2015. Dream Hops have become a familiar element in my series.

The concept of a spirit entering your dream is nothing new. However, I thought I was being super clever coming up with the term ‘dream hop,’ but apparently, I wasn’t. As it says in Ecclesiastics, there is nothing new under the sun.

I did a little Google search on the term. Back in 2017, two years after I published The Ghost Who Wasn’t, some guy registered the domain, dreamhopping.com, and he claims Dream Hopping is a trademarked term, but when I did a trademark search, it didn’t come up. I am not suggesting he lied; something might have been wrong with the search engine I used.

As I continued to search, I found other people using “Dream Hopping,” even a recent SpongeBob episode. When Googling the term, I found it scattered all over the internet, yet none coming up before I used the term.

But then I found a post from 2005—a decade prior to the publishing of The Ghost Who Wasn’t. It was on a dream forum I had never heard of before or visited. Member issaiah1332 wrote a post entitled “Dream Hopping,” and then went on to ask if it was possible to hop into another person’s dream. 

His or her question was not about ghost dream hopping. So, while I obviously can’t claim I coined the term, was I the first to use it when referring to a spirit visiting us in our sleep? Probably not.