Definition of "fantasy"

Is not this something more than fantasy?

c. 1599–1602, William Shakespeare, Hamlet, London, act 1, scene 1

A thousand fantasies / Begin to throng into my memory.

1634, John Milton, Comus

The whole position was so tremendous and so absolutely unearthly, that I believe it actually lulled our sense of terror, but to this hour I often see it in my dreams, and at its mere phantasy wake up covered with cold sweat.

1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887

Try as hard as it can, empirical science cannot come up with a naturalistic explanation; it can only slip into fantasies that make scientists feel good because they are in harmony with their opinions, prejudices, and unconscious assumptions about the nature of reality.

1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 92

Embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread.

1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, chapter 7, in The Scarlet Letter

Perhaps I would be able to help him recapture the well-being and emotional closeness he fantasied his brother had experienced with his parents prior to his birth.

2013, Mark J. Blechner, Hope and Mortality: Psychodynamic Approaches to AIDS and HIV

The kyng fantasied so much his daughter Anne that almost everything began to grow out of frame and good order

1641, George Cavendish, Thomas Wolsey, Late Cardinall, his Lyffe and Deathe

Which he doth most fantasy.

1518, Thomas More, translated by Robynson, Utopia, published 1551