About Dream

 Dreams are intriguing phenomena of the mind. There seem to be certain shared processes, for example, that are important to both dreaming and language. Some of these have been well-explored in the century since Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. In my own work work (Kilroe 1997, 1998, 1999a) I have explored the role of metaphor, metonymy, and punning in the formation of dream imagery.

            Now I would like to turn my attention to consideration of the question, Is the dream a text? And following that, a narrower question, Can the dream be properly thought of as a narrative? Although it has been assumed in past decades that text and narrative are terms appropriately applied to dreams, I would like look closely at these assumptions. I am going to propose that all dreams are texts, although this proposal rests on a particular use of the term dream, which is to be clarified below. I also propose that some but not necessarily all dream texts are narratives.  I am interested here in the form of dreams, in their narrativity, by way of inquiring into the cognitive aspects of narrative structure and its relation to language. I am also interested in the role of language in the generation of dreams. I am not here attempting to formulate an interpretative system for dreams, although I believe an encounter with potential meaning is unavoidable, accepting as I do that the dream is a metaphor in motion (Ullman 1969), and that in narrative the functional units are already units of content: “It is what a statement ‘means’ which constitutes it as a functional unit” (Barthes 1994:105).