Fine, pretty, and enormously overused — mostly by Japanese teenagers.

What a Japanese person actually thinks
Reads young. This is the character on a graduating class banner, on a school festival poster, on a pop idol's merchandise. Earnest and a bit adolescent.

Meaning

Literally: dream
Actually: Dream, both the sleeping kind and the ambition kind. Same double meaning as English.

Scores

Naturalness●●●●●

Completely normal.

Coolness●●●●●

It is a genuinely beautiful character to look at — that's most of the score. The meaning is doing very little work.

Watch out

Nothing embarrassing lurking in here.

Get this instead

志 kokorozashi
resolve; the ambition one commits to

The adult version of 夢. It implies you've decided, not that you're hoping.

On skin

夢

Orientation: either

Brush. It's an ornate character with a lot going on — a good brush render is stunning, a bad one is illegible.