O Sonho Texto e Narrativa.pdf

8/10/2019 O Sonho Texto e Narrativa.pdf

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Although the claim has been made that the concept of text in its broadest senserefers tomessages of any code (Nth 1990:331), it will be critical to my argument torecognize that the terms message and text are not synonymous. A message refers towhat one wishes to communicate; a text refers tohow the message is constructed(Danesi 1999:30). Whether or not a text must convey a message is a question of

relevance to the study of dreams. For purposes of the present discussion I will define atext by formal rather than semantic criteria. A text must have definable parameters; itmust be separable from other phenomena of experience by spatiotemporal boundaries.Thus a text is a formal unit. It also has coherence, the determination of which is made by the experiencer of the text; it is content expressed through a formal code whichmakes use of cohesive links to create an impression of unity.

A text, then, is a form that must have content, but that content does notnecessarily have a message. We could say, for example, that Lewis Carrolls

Jabberwocky is a text because as a poem it is a formally cohesive unit, but that itscontent is semantically empty and hence conveys no message. (If there is a message, itis arrived at only when an interpreter views the poem as a signifier in a broader culturalcontext.) Conversely, a specific message such as children are lovable could beformalized through a variety of codes, e.g., a photo exhibit in a museum, a book withoutillustrations, or a televised public service announcement. Each different product ofencoding this message would have to be considered a separate text despite the identityof the message of their content. In general, however, a text without a message seems arather pointless exercise. Communicators that they are, people seem to pay moreattention to meaning than to form. Because a form whose content is semantically emptyis unlikely to hold our interest, the great majority of texts will contain a message ofsome sort. So I will take form as the primary marker in identifying a text, butmeaning the message as the overwhelmingly likely motive for the creation of a text.

The etymology of the wordtext , something woven (from the past participle ofthe Latin verbtexere , to weave), refers to a characteristic of textuality that might bedefined as a coherent whole (Nth 1990:332). For Danesi (1999:6), A text is,literally, a weaving together of the elements taken from a specific code in order tocommunicate something. For example, When someone says something to someone orwrites a letter, he or she is engaged in making averbal text ; when someone selectsclothing items to dress for an occasion, he or she is making abodily text ... The notionof a woven, that is, coherent, product is pivotal in the consideration of dreams as texts.

Is the dream a text? My response is a qualified yes which is dependent upon a particular use of the termdream . Texts have boundaries; as products separated from thestream of continuous experience, they allow us to focus on them extracted from other phenomena. By my use of the termdream I mean the dream once we have experiencedit. To say I had a dream is to acknowledge an isolatable experience with temporal boundaries that begins where we can recall it beginning, and it ends where we can recallit ending. Through criteria of form we recognize a dream as a subjective text, and if theformal properties of texts are their defining factor, then the question of whether or notthe dream conveys a message can be treated separately. As a discrete unit of form, theexperienced dream coheres and so can be considered a text.

Semantically, the dream may or may not seem to cohere, although a lack ofsemantic coherence may be a result of not knowing how to read the dream text, to


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paraphrase Jung (1974:97). It seems reasonable to suppose that if dreams are indeedtexts as I am asserting, then they generally have a message-based content; this followsfrom the observation that meaningless texts would rarely attract our interest, and clearlymany people are intensely interested in the presumed meaning of their own dream-texts.But of course this view rests on my argument that experienced dreams are texts.

Moreover, I do not limit the termmessage to the sense of lesson, but rather accept theuse ofmessage for any event sequence that can broadly be said to constitute the plot ofthe dream.

The dream while it is being dreamed is experience, not text. Our memory of thatexperience, whether we report is or not, is the text of the dream. So there is something between the initial experience of the dream and the dream report, just as there issomething between waking experience and our report of that experience. The report in both cases is a text; the experience itself is not. The experience becomes a text once it isa completed product; we recognize it as a cohesive phenomenon bounded in space andtime, having form as well as content. So the dream becomes a text the moment theinitial experience of it has ended, just as a waking experience can become a text as soonas we are able to reflect on it as something that happened to us.

The more difficult question concerns the relation of the experienced dream to thedream report, and which of them is the appropriate object of inquiry into dreamtextuality and narrativity. That the dream report is a text seems uncontroversial. Thereport takes form through a medium, whether visual (pictorial), or verbal (spoken orwritten). It has a beginning, middle, and end formally speaking, it has spatiotemporal boundaries. It also has cohesive links: in a verbal report we find, for example, the use ofanaphoric pronouns (we, her...), adverbials (there, suddenly...), and other commondevices of textuality. There are often near-formulaic statements, e.g., for beginnings, Itstarts out with..., endings, ...And thats all I can remember a nd even midstreamtransitions, Then, suddenly, the scene shifted.

Obviously, when we work with dreams, we can only work with the report of adream, which is an objective product. But we are doing the same when we report awaking experience. In order to share any experience, the experiencer must encode it in arepresentational system such as language, which is both enabling and limiting in itscapacity for full and accurate representation. But we dont discount the value of a report

because it isnt iden tical to the experience; rather, we accept reports of wakingexperience as simply the best means available for representing and relating them. We

can think of dream reports in the same way. If a report of waking experience can beconsidered a workable representation of that experience, then the dream report cananalogously be considered a workable representation of the dreamers subjectiveexperience of the dream. The report and from here on I will be considering onlyverbal (spoken or written) dream reports is the best means we have for representingour dream experience in a way that allows it to be anchored in time and communicatedto others. We can hardly produce a dream report, moreover, if the experienced dream isnot already a unit of text.

It is ofinterest to note here Jungs apparent lack of concern about the gap between the experienced dream text and the dream report. In his argument againstFreuds manifest dream being a facade for the latent dream, Jung seems to presupposethe adequacy of the dream report as a valid object of textual inquiry:


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The manifest dream -picture is the dream itself and contains the wholemeaning of the dream... What Freud calls the dream -facade is the dreamsobscurity, and this is really only a projection of our own lack of understanding.We say that the dream has a false front only because we fail to see into it. Wewould do better to say that we are dealing with something like a text that is

unintelligible not because it has a facade a text has no facade but simply because we cannot read it. We do not have to get behind such a text, but mustfirst learn to read it. (Jung 1974:97)

Support for the adequacy of reports also comes from laboratory evidence.Kramer (1993:157-8), for example, provides a summary of work that justifies relianceon dream reports as sufficiently faithful representations of the dream:

...experimental laboratory research has provided support, it not confirmation, tothe idea that there is significant similarity between the dream experience and thedream report (Taub, Kramer, Arand, and Jacobs, 1978). Eye movements anddream action during REM sleep are relatable (Roffwarg, Dement, Muzio, andFisher, 1962). The intensity of the psychological experience during REM sleepand the dream report of that experience covary (Kramer et al., 1975).Experiments in which stimuli presented during sleep are incorporated intodreams suggest a relationship between the dream experience and the dreamreport (Kramer, Kinney, and Scharf, 1983).2

Although no dream report can ever be as satisfying as direct access to the dreamitself, the latter is impossible, and the former is what there is to work with, and that inabundance. Freuds notion of secondary revision notwithstanding (discussed in thefollowing section), it may be impossible to know precisely what modifications thereporting process imposes on the experienced dream. So it is necessary to begin, atleast, by examining dreamreports for evidence of textuality and narrativity in theexperienced dream, as indirect an approach as this may be. In addition to positing thatexperienced dreams are texts, I consider the verbal dream report to be a particular formof text which transforms the experienced-dream text into an objective product,analogously to the way a given story can be told through different media. For theremainder of this paper, then, I will employ the termdream text in reference to both theexperienced dream and the verbal report of that dream. At the very least, from studyingverbal dream reports we can learn something about textuality and narrativity as mental processes that provide frameworks for the representation of experience. At best,

however, we may come to better understand the creation and structuring of unconsciousdream texts.

3. Narrative and narrative elements

I now consider whether dream texts can properly be called narratives. Perhapsno discussion of narrative can proceed without being prefaced by Roland Barthes well -known statement:

2 But cf., e.g., Solms (1997), which scrutinizes the relation between dreaming and REMsleep.


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Numberless are the worlds narratives. First of all in a prodigious variety ofgenres, themselves distributed among different substances, as if any materialwere appropriate for man to entrust his stories to it: narrative can be supported by articulated speech, oral or written, by image, fixed or moving, by gesture, and by the organized mixture of all these substances; it is present in myth, legend,

fable, tale, tragedy, comedy, epic, history, pantomime, painting..., stained-glasswindow, cinema, comic book, news item, conversation. (Barthes 1994:95)

And letdream-text be added to this list.

Various scholars of narratology have contributed what amounts to a definition ofnarrative. I cite only several, selected on the basis of their potential relevance to thestructure of dreams. Toolan (1988:7), for example offers what he terms a first attemptat a minimalist definition of narrative as a perceived sequence of non -randomlyconnected events.

Sarbin (1986:9) defines narrative as a way of organizing episodes, actions, and accounts of actions; it is an achievement that brings together mundane facts andfantastic creations; time and place are incorporated. For Prince (1982:1), narrativemay be defined as the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence. And among the best -known minimalist statements on narrative is surely thatof Todorov, who defined narrative as the shift from one equilibrium to another . . .,separated by a period of imbalance (1986:328). This statement merits attention, having been a source of disagreement with respect to dreams in States (1988:152):

Dreams do not proceed on such a structure, partly because they do not (at leastnarratively) begin and end. A dream seems to be a steady disequilibrium, withno functional or thematic interest in solving or rounding out a problem. Thenarrative of the dream is concerned withramifications of a tension, ... not withgetting me into trouble (or pleasure) and out of it, but with extending the trouble(or pleasure) to the boundaries of the feeling that produced the dream.

While this statement may be characterize certain dreams, it relies on a narrow conceptof narrative appropriate to the study of literary texts.3 It also conflicts with Jungsformulation of the structure of the average dream (for which, see below). But as with

3 Also cf. the discussion in States (1993:75) of how unlike stories dreams are, e.g. thatdream reports do not read like s tories; on the contrary, most dream reports preserve themain structural features of dream narrative, including the in medias res beginning, theunexplained gaps and shifts in scene, and the inconclusive ending. Here I take States remarksas a plea against the dream being comparable to a literary text, but presupposing some kind ofnarrative form for dreams.


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the termtext , once again it is a broad conception of narrative which permits us toinclude dreams reports as a type of narrative, for as I will illustrate, dream reports dorepresent events and situations in a sequence, bringing together both mundane facts andfantastic creations into a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events, whichare characterizable as the shift from one equilibrium to another. It is also worth noting

that Barthes (1994:147) saw the dream in contrast to the classical narrative because it isremoved from the logico -temporal order, while the classical narrative is readable because it contains a sequence of events narrated in an irreversible (logico-temporal)order; yet through the ages the narrative subverts itself (modernizes itself) byintensifying in its general structure the work of reversibility.

Before turning to the basic elements of narrative, mention may be made here ofthe problem of reliance on dream reportsin connection with Freuds secondary revision.Although Freud was concerned not with the gap between the remembered dream andthe report of that dream but rather with the manifest dream and the supposed latentthoughts that lay concealed behind it, his notion of secondary revision is neverthelessrelevant to the question of the dreams relation to the dream report. Freud wrote that

...we should disregard the apparent coherence between a dreams constituents asan unessential illusion, and ... trace back the origin of each of its elements on itsown account.... a psychical force is at work in dreams which creates thisapparent connectedness, which ... submits the material produced by the dream-work to a secondary revision. (1900:486)

Freud further explained this process as the psychical activity which, though it does notappear to accompany the construction of dreams invariably, yet, whenever it does so, isconcerned to fuse together elements in a dream which are of a disparate origin into awhole which shall make sense and be without contradiction. (Freud 1900:496). Heidentified secondary revision with waking thought, because according to him it behavesin the same way, establishing order in perceptual material, setting up relations in it, andmaking it conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole (Freud 1900:537).

In short, Freud seemed to recognize that the same text-making, narratizingcapacity that helps us make sense of waking experience is operative in the dream, andthat the dream only achieves an impression of coherence thanks to this capacity. He alsoassumed that secondary revision operates simultaneously with the other aspects ofdream formation (condensation, representability, censorship), and not subsequent to

them (Freud 1900:537), which lends support to my claim that text-making, narratizing processes are at work as the dream is created; they are not simply imposed by thelinguistic constraints of the dream report.

This view would seem to contradict Hartmanns (1996:12) statement that in adream what is experienced generally is images..., which leads in turn to the cautionthat though we are often forced to work with verbal dream reports we need to keep inmind that these are only attempts to render the dream experience in a preservable andreproducible form. This warning notwithstanding, I am proceeding under theassumption that there is a narratizing principle at work in the dream formation processwhich helps to organize perceptual material into a coherent text. I suggest that, while itmay be true that the potential to narratize dreams is as surely wired into the human

brain as is the potential to speak language (Foulkes 1982:276), narratizing is integral to


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the formation of many dreams, and narrative form is further enhanced and intensifiedwhen the dream text is rendered as a verbal report.

Narrative elements

Many dream texts would seem to lend themselves to analysis along the linesdeveloped by narratologists for other sorts of texts. The basic elements of narrative have been put forward by, for example, Chatman (1978), in reference to Todorovsformulation of the structuralist view of narrative in the 1960s (cf. Barthes 1994:102).Chatman divides narratives into two basic parts, story and discourse.

A story (histoire) [is] the content or chain of events (actions, happenings), pluswhat may be called the existents (characters, items of setting); and a discourse(discours ) ... [is] the expression, the means by which the content iscommunicated. In simple terms, the story is thewhat in a narrative that isdepicted, discourse is thehow . (Chatman 1978:19)

Narrative discourse, in turn, consists of the narrative form (narrative voice, point ofview, etc.) and the manifestation of the narrative in a specific medium (Chatman1978:22).

I will keep to Chatmans basic formulation of story and discourse, incorporatinginto it Bals (1985) usage of the terms event , actors and to act : An event is thetransition from one state to another state. Actors are agents that perform actions. Theyare not necessarily human.To act is defined ... as to cause or to experience an event.(Bal 1985: 5)

Half a century ago, Jung provided a succinct formulation of the structure of theaverage dream, borrowing from the classification of the elements of dramatic plot foundin Aristotles Poetics . My focus here will be on the story component of narrative ratherthan the discourse, and what I will explore will be a blend of ideas gleaned from Jung,Chatman and Bal. Jung identified an opening Exposition phase, consisting of astatement of place, and a statement about the protagonists, and less frequently astatement of time; this phase also often indicates the dreamers initial situation. Thisfirst phase is followed by the Development of the plot, in which tension develops and

the situation in the dream becomes complicated. In the third phase there is aCulmination ( peripeteia ), in which something decisive occurs or changes completely.The final phase is the Solution or Result (lysis) , which shows the final situation; this phase is sometimes lacking (Jung 1974:80-1).

The adequacy of Jungs formulation for dream reports and its relation to theelements of narrative just mentioned will be taken up in the following section. Here itmay be said that Jungs Exposition phase corresponds roughly to a presentation of theexistents of narrative structure (setting, actors) and Jungs remaining phases,Development, Culmination, and Result, are all aspects of the content of narrative(events acted by actors). In addition to the termactor for agents that perform actions in

dreams, I will use the termcharacter to encompass, additionally, animate beings whoappear as presences in dreams without acting.


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4. Sample dream texts

I now turn to analysis of dream texts. I have chosen data from my dream journalin order to investigate Jungs proposed narrative structure of dreams. 4 First I will lookat a set of texts in order to see how well the Exposition phase, i.e. the identification of

existents, characterizes the texts in the set. Next I will look at the narrative structure of acomplete dream text.

Orientations: The Exposition phase

Beginning with the Exposition phase, which may consist of the spatial and possibly temporal setting, the characters involved, and the initial situation, my journalcontains numerous reports which begin by situating the dreamer in a certain location,although some are quite simple, others more elaborate. For example:

1. I walk into a large old hall of a college building. It seems to be StevenPinkers office, or a classroom where he teaches.

2. I am standing on a bluff.

3. In a house with others (someone elses). On a couch in a den with J. to my leftand a man to his left.

4. I am in a meadow at twilight with J. It is huge, open, green, with gentlyrolling hills at the edges. There is a pedestrian tunnel or passageway.

5. I come out of a building at dark, early evening in winter, onto a slippery backyard slope with someone else.

6. I am lying on a table, like a hospital operating table, in a room with cognitivescience and linguistics faculty.

7. At a show of some kind, like the Spectrum or other indoor amphitheatre. I sitnext to J. in a sideways-facing mezzanine level.

8. I happen on a park with a pool, amid rolling hills and open space.

9. I am in a large house/building with others. A room with a huge scorpionrunning around.

10. I am in a tower, with members of a committee.

4 Despite my reluctance to expose personal material, the ready access these datapermit to a network of associations in my waking life is a compelling reason to draw fromthem. I refer to myself as the dreamer in this analysis because in looking at my dream texts, Ido not feel identical to the I of the dream so much as represented by a dream character whoseems to be me.


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11. I am with some man--J., V., a composite, or someone . We arrive at amuseum parking lot.

12. Flying in an airplane with a man, maybe two.

As diverse as the surface features of these settings described by these statementsmay be, each one describes the dreamers initial location. Sometimes the op eningstatement incorporates other characters in the dream. In (4), for example, the firstsentence consists of a statement of physical setting, temporal setting, and actors. Thefirst sentence in (3), by contrast, situates the dreamer in a location that includes other people who are not individualized, although it is made clear that this is not thedreamers domicile. The second sentence specifies the dreamers position in the setting,and includes information about the dreamers position with respect to o ther actors, nowdepicted as individuals. In (5) the initial sentence shows the dreamer and an unnamedcharacter actually entering upon the scene, which is described in terms of both time and place.

Occasionally the introduction of actors precedes that of location, as in e.g., (11).Finally, sometimes the opening sentence describes location, characters, and a situation,all three, as in (12).

The second (and third) sentence of the Exposition phase of these dream textsmay provide further description ofthat place, e.g. (4), It is huge, open, green, withgently rolling hills at the edges. There is a pedestrian tunnel or passageway, or it may,additionally, incorporate a situation in progress, as in (9), A room with a huge scorpionrunning around.

Almost as easily found in my journal, however, are dream reports in whichcharacters and setting seem to be of secondary or no importance, for the dream text begins directly with a statement of the situation, occasionally incorporating the dreameras actor. For example:

13. Someone has advertised something in the newspaper something for sale.

With someone else driving, we go to meet this person at a designated spot on

the highway. It appears to be San Francisco-like, and we have to drive onto a bridge that is partly mostly underwater. Several cars have either been wreckedor stranded off to the left.

14. There is a fire somewhere nearby.

The kids and I go out to see where, and after some confused searching, turningin this direction and that, I see the fire blazing on top of a (suburban) hill, burning down a house, I think. Later we seem to be closer to it and I see some

kind of glass office building in ruins, post-fire smouldering.


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15. I am looking for our (familys) plane tickets to China.

The flight is for 5 p.m. tomorrow, and I want to confirm it. I keep looking in the

stack of papers inside my top drawer, but I cant see close up anymore, so Idont find it --perhaps because I just keep missing seeing it.

16. I am a substitute drummer for the Grateful Dead.

For some reason Mickey Hart (the only drummer for the Dead in the dream), issick or otherwise unavailable, and I have been selected to play in his stead.

17. My cookware (pots and pans) is chipped.

The stainless steel, I think, but especially my cast iron skillet, which moreclosely resembles V.s iron pan. There is a wavy, bite -sized chip in i t about aninch or so long.

In (13) and (14), subsequent sentences do provide information on setting andcharacters, although in (14) they are incorporated into an elaboration of the situation. In(15), the opening statement of situation is followed by one of explanation for theactivity, which is followed in turn by a sentence providing minimal information on thedreamers location (before the top drawer). In (16), the dream report opens with astatement of the dreamers situation, which is followed b y an explanation for this stateof affairs, recognized as unusual even in the dream. Setting and finally characters areintroduced in this dream only after several more sentences which expand upon theinitial situation.

The dream text of (17), presented in its brief entirety above, consists of a staticimage of a set of objects. Aside from the dreamer as witness to the image, there are no

characters and there is no setting or action, merely this one situation.To summarize, there are considerable possibilities for variation within the

Exposition phase which nevertheless preserve its structure. I found no examples ofdreams that did not haveany of the elements identified by Jung as pertaining to this phase within the first few statements of the text; even dreams such as (17) whichconsisted of a single image had at least the element of a situation in some, albeitunidentified, space. The initial statements of dream reports seem to fit Chafes statementon narratives in general --they give evidence that the mind has a need for orientation interms of space, time, social context, and ongoing events (Chafe 1990:97), this evidence

being that narratives typically begin with a statement of the particular place, time, characters, and background activity against which the events of the narrative proper


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then unfold (Chafe 1990:94). Or, to use Chatmans term, this orientation is achievedthrough a statement of existents.

Full dream text

Turning now to the remaining phases of the dream as suggested by Jung(Development,

Culmination, and Solution or Result), I present a dream report in its entirety in order toinvestigate the presence of these phases and their narrative elements. The numbering ofthe statements is my division into the phases.5 The Exposition phase of this dream text,consisting of a statement of place and a statement about the protagonists, wasintroduced as (7); it is repeated here as (18a):

18. At an Indoor Amphitheatre with J .

18a. At a show of some kind, like the Spectrum or other indoor amphitheatre. I sitnext to J. in a sideways-facing mezzanine level.

18b. During intermission, I go out and realize the music can be heard out here.Standing around one of the entrances, I sing along with the music it sounds likethe Grateful Dead, at least vaguely. I note with someone passing from out to inhow you can hear the show outside [its in some big city, but which ?], but weagree wed prefer to be inside.

18c. It looks like its E., and he adds, as he passes me going in, how its only fivedollars anyway. I think for a moment, because I paid more, and realize that wasfor reserved seats. Did I really need them?

18d. I make my way back to my seat. J. already seated in his. A woman like G. [fromUT] comes along and we try to figure out which is her seat, since shes trying tosit in mine.

5 Although it has no direct bearing on the question of narrative structure, readers

interested in the story content of the dream may find it useful to know that at the time of thedream, I had recently begun a full-time faculty position at a university in a Southern state, afterteaching part-time in the Midwest since graduate school (UT). I was also about to be divorcedfrom someone (J.) whose academic career had taken precedence over mine and as a resultwas the main reason I had remained for years in what I considered a one-down position ofuniversity adjunct. E. is a person of brief, distant acquaintance to me who had recently becomea professor in a field where training is in demand by students but which I consideracademically soft, so in my opinion E. found a faculty p osition with less struggle than I did. G.is an acquaintance from my graduate school days who at the time was apparently content tobe an adjunct lecturer supporting her husband, a graduate student preparing for an academiccareer.


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In (18a) there is both a statement of setting (indoor amphitheatre), and astatement of actors (dreamer and dreamers spouse), as well as further information onthe situation in progress (a show of some kind) and of the actors specific position in theamphitheatre: not only are they at the mezzanine level of this amphitheatre, but they arefacing sideways. Thus the Exposition positions the actors as spectators to the

performance of some ongoing action, yet they are not facing this action directly, butrather indirectly, i.e. sideways (possibly a pun that they are not facing the music withrespect to a situation).

The next, Development, phase of the dream I have identified as (18b).Something is supposed to occur; tension develops and the situation becomescomplicated in the Development phase. The development in the present text appears to be rather ordinary. The dreamer leaves her initial position and exits the structure, a shiftof position which causes her to become an outsider after having been an insideradjacent to a spouse. The dreamer is still participating in the action of the performancefrom this exterior position, not as a spectator facing the stage sideways, but as an actorin the open air, with greater freedom of movement, who from this fringe positionactually participates in the action of the show. Using terms from narratology, the dreamtext depicts actors acting in events at this phase.

The Culmination phase of this dream, which would see something decisiveoccurring or changing suddenly, I have identified as (18c). The dreamer is speakinghere with another outsider who is on his way in. This brief exchange of talkintroduces a puzzle into the narrative. The dreamer learns that some people, at least, paid less for their seats than she did. Why did she pay more? The question seems to beresolved upon the realization that the dreamers seats were reserved. But a furtherconcern is then introduced: it seems now as though it might not have been necessary to pay extra for reserved seats, although no definitive resolution about this is offered at thisstage. But the matter of reserved seating seems to be pivotal, for a doubt has beenintroduced. Was the dreamer duped through naivety? Perhaps she has merely beenoverly cautious. Or it may be that the purchase of reserved seating was wise. Perhapsthe dreamer is more vulnerable than others to the loss of her seat and needs the added protection of reserved seating, or perhaps she simply had to pay a higher price thanothers to guarantee her place. Events at this phase allow for these questions to be posed,although they remain unanswered here.

The final part of the dream presents the Solution or Result, identified as (18d).

The dreamer has left her seat, exited the building, learned something about seating inthe amphitheater, and now returns to her seat with this new information. To findsomeone else occupying ones seat presents a response to the question of whether or notit was necessary to pay for reserved seating. For here is someone from the dreamers past in her seat, and only her reserved ticket proves that the dreamer, and not thisacquaintance from her graduate school days, is entitled to occupy this particular seat. Soit was a good idea to have a reserved seat after all.

This dream, while not the stuff of high drama, nevertheless conforms to thegeneral characterization of narrative as the representation of ... events and situations ina time sequence (Prince) with actors acting and experiencing events. It also conforms

to Jungs phases and can be said to have an identifiable beginning, middle, and end,wherein, following orientation to the existents, there is a development of the situation, a


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problem identified, a question or puzzle to which the problem gives rise, and a responseto that puzzle, resulting ultimately in a shift from one equilibrium to another(Todorov).

Although many additional dream reports I have reviewed also seem to conform

to this suggested narrative pattern, not all do. Short dream fragments, for example, seemto resemble snapshots more than stories. If some dream reports have narrative structure, but others do not, then it is not the case that we inevitably impose narrative form ondreams in order to relate them, since we are capable of reporting dreams that do notconform to this structure. Recall that for Freud, secondary revision does not appear toaccompany the construction of dreams invariably (Freud 1900:496). This in turn lendssupport to the view that our dream reports may be fair representations of our dreamsafter all.

5. Concluding thoughts

By way of conclusion, I would like to highlight three points.

First, I hope to have demonstrated convincingly that the dream-once-dreamed isa text, one that often but not always has narrative structure. The dream text is made upof strands of disparate thoughts weaving their way through our minds as we sleep. Theloom which allows these threads to be woven together is a narratizing process that is part of human cognition. The dreamreport is also a text which, as a representation, willreflect the narrative structure of the experienced dream or its absence. But as a linguisticrepresentation, the verbal dream report will also enhance the narrative organization ofthe dream text. An analogy may be made with the structuring that occurs when weexpress our waking thoughts in spoken or written language: the content of ideas is inessence the same whether it is expressed or only thought, but expressing thoughtsthrough linguistic representation structures them in specific ways.

Further, dream texts will vary in their degree of narrativity, ranging fromfragmentary snapshot to epic tale.6 Some remembered dreams seem less coherent thanothers, but it is still the case that we remember a dream, no matter how bizarre ortenuous the connection between images seems to the waking mind. So, we do notnecessarily impose narrative structure on the dream, since we are as capable of reportinga dream with narrative form as without.

For a dream to have narrative form is necessarily for it to have structuredcontent, but not necessarily to have a message in the sense of a lesson.7 However

6 Possibly the degree of narrativity in dreams is connected with whether dreams areexperienced in REM or non-REM sleep (see Hartmann 1996 on REM sleep as the source ofmost or our memorable dreams). Or perhaps the relative dominance of left or right brainhemispheric functions during dreaming can account for varying degrees of dream narrativity

(see discussion in Hunt 1989).

7 Alternatively, a dream-text may have multiple messages, and what Corti has said of

the literary text may apply equally to the dreamtext: Every text i s many texts in that the verynature of its polysemic complexity prevents identically repetitive readings even in the same


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minimally, simple action sequences which begin and end and are ordered with respect toeach other, involving characters, settings, and usually the tension of a dilemma, docount as narratives. What we usually call a story is a product of having imposedconventional narrative structures on selected content. But I dont see that dreams aretrying to become stories (Hunt 1989:177) so much as they are rudimentary, unrefinedstories, a shifting from one equilibrium to another (Todorov).

My second point has to do with the relation of narrative structure to language.Two possibilities present themselves concerning the nature of this relationship. One isthat narratizing is a cognitive process, but not a linguistic one. This seems to be the

position of Turner (1996), for example, who claims that narrative imagining story is the fundamental instrument of thought, that it is our chief means of looking into thefuture, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining and that it is a capacityindispensable to human cognition generally (pp. 4 -5). Turner speculates that thelinguistic mind is a consequence and subcategory of the literary mind. (p.141) That is,the ability to recognize and execute small spatial stories (p.25) precedes linguis ticexpression.

The other possibility is that narratizing is a linguistic process, which means thatall narratives are the product of verbal thought, and even phenomena such as mime actsand wordless comic strips, while legitimately qualifying as narratives, can neverthelessonly be generated and in turn interpreted by language users. I am not here committingto one or the other possibility concerning the role of language in the narrative process, but I mention the issue because it is relevant to my final point.

My final point concerns the relation of language to dreaming, a complex issuewhich can only be mentioned here (see Kilroe 1999b). If narratizing is a cognitive process independent of language, then narrative-like dreams are not necessarilygenerated by language. But if narratizing is a linguistic process, then dreams with anarrative quality are either essentially unconscious verbal thoughts illustrated byimagery, or they are a weave of unconscious presentational imagery andrepresentational verbal thought (cf. Hunt 1989).

So one type of dream may consist of a sequence of images illustratingunconscious verbal thoughts, which are the subliminal continuation of the mind chatterthat we experience while awake. Not all dreams are necessarily structured this way, butthose that are can often be matched to verbally established metaphors, puns, and other

linguistic phenomena (Kilroe 1999a). And although dream images may be drawn fromand recombined out of nonverbal perceptions stored in memory, it would still be verbalthought that motivates these images to come together to form a text.

From this point of view, disparate strands of verbal thought make up thedreamers mental discourse, from scattered impressions to focused preoccupations.These strands are unconsciously woven into narrative form while we sleep, resulting ina discourse of imagery that forms a dream text which we report, usually verbally, as ourdream. Opacity between the dream report and the unconscious verbal thoughts prevents

cultural context (1978:42). And it is the interpreter of a text who at least partially constructsits meaning and supplies its coherence.


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the straightforward retrieval of the latter into consciousness.8 It is like trying to tell astory from the illustrations alone and not having access to the verbal text that gave riseto the illustrations in the first place we may be correct in saying what the authorsstory is, or partially correct, or simply mistaken.

In any case, whether dreams are generated by linguistic processes or bynonlinguistic cognitive processes, the study of the form of dreams helps to show thatnarrative structure is not an artful invention but rather a natural process of the mind.

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Chafe, W. (1990). Some things that narratives tell us about the mind. In B.K. Britton &A.D. Pellegrini (Eds.), Narrative thought and narrative language (pp. 79-98). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Chatman, S. (1978).Story and discourse: Narrative structure in fiction and film. Ithacaand London: Cornell University Press.

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Hartmann, E. (1996). Outline for a theory on the nature and functions of dreaming. Dreaming , vol. 6, no. 2.

8 But note that while this echoes Freud in agreeing that dreams are formed fromthoughts of which we are unaware, it is not identical to claiming that the true dream consistsof latent thoughts that both motivate and hide behind a manifest dream. Following Jung, I takethe dream-as-dreamed to be a valid object of study. This does not prevent us from inquiringinto the source of dreams, however, including, in this case, the role of verbal thinking in dreamformation.


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Hunt, H. (1989).The multiplicity of dreams: Memory, imagination, and consciousness . New Haven: Yale University Press.

Jung, C. G.(1974). Dreams . FromThe collected works of C.G. Jung , vols. 4,8,12,16.Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kilroe, P. (1999a). What is a play on words without words? Consider the dream pun.Ms. under review.

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States, B. (1993). Dreaming and storytelling . Ithaca and London: Cornell UniversityPress.

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