To begin with, the term text has been understood broadly in recent decades, and it is this broad understanding which permits the notion of text to be extended to dreams. We may say that texts “can be any physical structure at all made to embody ideas in the semiotic sense,” (Deely 1990:64-5) and that text is “the primary element (basic unit) of culture,” generated by the systems of cultural codes (Uspenskij et al. 1973:6). Hence the application of text semiotics to a broad range of cultural phenomena. Danesi (1999:30) for example, includes “routine conversations,” along with “musical compositions, stage plays, dance styles, and ceremonies,” as examples of “products of our text-making capacity.”
Although the claim has been made that the concept of text “in its broadest sense refers to messages of any code” (Nöth 1990:331), it will be critical to my argument to recognize that “the terms message and text are not synonymous. A message refers to what one wishes to communicate; a text refers to how 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 a text by formal rather than semantic criteria. A text must have definable parameters; it must 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 which makes use of cohesive links to create an impression of unity.
A text, then, is a form that must have content, but that content does not necessarily have a message. We could say, for example, that Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky is a text because as a poem it is a formally cohesive unit, but that its content is semantically empty and hence conveys no message. (If there is a message, it is arrived at only when an interpreter views the poem as a signifier in a broader cultural context.) Conversely, a specific message such as “children are lovable” could be formalized through a variety of codes, e.g., a photo exhibit in a museum, a book without illustrations, or a televised public service announcement. Each different product of encoding this message would have to be considered a separate text despite the identity of the message of their content. In general, however, a text without a message seems a rather pointless exercise. Communicators that they are, people seem to pay more attention to meaning than to form. Because a form whose content is semantically empty is unlikely to hold our interest, the great majority of texts will contain a message of some sort. So I will take form as the primary marker in identifying a text, but meaning—the message—as the overwhelmingly likely motive for the creation of a text.
The etymology of the word text, ‘something woven’ (from the past participle of the Latin verb texere, ‘to weave’), refers to a characteristic of textuality that might be defined as a “coherent whole” (Nöth 1990:332). For Danesi (1999:6), “A text is, literally, a ‘weaving together’ of the elements taken from a specific code in order to communicate something.” For example, “When someone says something to someone or writes a letter, he or she is engaged in making a verbal text; when someone selects clothing items to dress for an occasion, he or she is making abodily text...” The notion of 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 term dream. Texts have boundaries; as products separated from the stream of continuous experience, they allow us to focus on them extracted from other phenomena. By my use of the term dream I mean ‘the dream once we have experienced it’. 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 recall it ending. Through criteria of form we recognize a dream as a subjective text, and if the formal properties of texts are their defining factor, then the question of whether or not the dream conveys a message can be treated separately. As a discrete unit of form, the experienced dream coheres and so can be considered a text.
Semantically, the dream may or may not seem to cohere, although a lack of semantic coherence may be a result of not knowing how to read the dream text, to paraphrase Jung (1974:97). It seems reasonable to suppose that if dreams are indeed texts as I am asserting, then they generally have a message-based content; this follows from the observation that meaningless texts would rarely attract our interest, and clearly many 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 term message to the sense of ‘lesson’, but rather accept the use of message for any event sequence that can broadly be said to constitute the plot of the dream.
The dream while it is being dreamed is experience, not text. Our memory of that experience, 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 is something 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 is a completed product; we recognize it as a cohesive phenomenon bounded in space and time, having form as well as content. So the dream becomes a text the moment the initial experience of it has ended, just as a waking experience can become a text as soon as 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 the dream report, and which of them is the appropriate object of inquiry into dream textuality and narrativity. That the dream report is a text seems uncontroversial. The report takes form through a medium, whether visual (pictorial), or verbal (spoken or written). 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 of anaphoric pronouns (we, her...), adverbials (there, suddenly...), and other common devices of textuality. There are often near-formulaic statements, e.g., for beginnings, “It starts out with...”, endings, “...And that’s all I can remember” and even midstream transitions, “Then, suddenly, the scene shifted”.
Obviously, when we work with dreams, we can only work with the report of a dream, which is an objective product. But we are doing the same when we report a waking experience. In order to share any experience, the experiencer must encode it in a representational system such as language, which is both enabling and limiting in its capacity for full and accurate representation. But we don’t discount the value of a report because it isn’t identical to the experience; rather, we accept reports of waking experience 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 be considered a workable representation of that experience, then the dream report can analogously be considered a workable representation of the dreamer’s subjective experience of the dream. The report—and from here on I will be considering only verbal (spoken or written) dream reports—is the best means we have for representing our dream experience in a way that allows it to be anchored in time and communicated to others. We can hardly produce a dream report, moreover, if the experienced dream is not already a unit of text.
It is of interest to note here Jung’s apparent lack of concern about the gap between the experienced dream text and the dream report. In his argument against Freud’s manifest dream being a facade for the latent dream, Jung seems to presuppose the adequacy of the dream report as a valid object of textual inquiry:
The “manifest” dream-picture is the dream itself and contains the whole meaning of the dream... What Freud calls the “dream-facade” is the dream’s obscurity, 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. We would 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 must first 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 reliance on dream reports as sufficiently faithful representations of the dream:
...experimental laboratory research has provided support, it not confirmation, to the idea that there is significant similarity between the dream experience and the dream report (Taub, Kramer, Arand, and Jacobs, 1978). Eye movements and dream action during REM sleep are relatable (Roffwarg, Dement, Muzio, and Fisher, 1962). The intensity of the psychological experience during REM sleep and the dream report of that experience covary (Kramer et al., 1975). Experiments in which stimuli presented during sleep are incorporated into dreams suggest a relationship between the dream experience and the dream report (Kramer, Kinney, and Scharf, 1983).2
Although no dream report can ever be as satisfying as direct access to the dream itself, the latter is impossible, and the former is what there is to work with, and that in abundance. Freud’s notion of secondary revision notwithstanding (discussed in the following section), it may be impossible to know precisely what modifications the reporting process imposes on the experienced dream. So it is necessary to begin, at least, by examining dream reports for evidence of textuality and narrativity in the experienced dream, as indirect an approach as this may be. In addition to positing that experienced dreams are texts, I consider the verbal dream report to be a particular form of 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 the remainder of this paper, then, I will employ the term dream text in reference to both the experienced dream and the verbal report of that dream. At the very least, from studying verbal 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 unconscious dream texts.
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