see text Oneirodidae, the dreamers are a family of marine ray-finned fishes belonging to the order Lophiiformes, the anglerfishes.

[2] Oneirodes had been proposed as a monospecific genus in 1871 by the Danish zoologist Christian Frederik Lütken when he described O. eschrichtii, giving its type locality as off the western coast of Greenland.

Lütken did not explain this choice of name, David Starr Jordan and Barton Warren Evermann suggested in 1898 that the name referred to the small, skin-covered eyes.

Alternatively, in 2009 Theodore Wells Pietsch III proposed that the name was given because a "fish so strange and marvelous that it could only be imagined in the dark of the night during a state of unconsciousness".

[4] These fishes also have a bioluminescent bulb at the tip on the illicium, lack any fleshy growths along the centre of the back, do not have upward pointing mouths, there are teeth on the upper denticular bone,, the esca has no small tooth-like structures, they have large eyes and large olfactory organs with forward opening nostrils located at the end of the snout.