By way of conclusion, I would like to highlight three points.
First, I hope to have demonstrated convincingly that the dream-once-dreamed is a text, one that often but not always has narrative structure. The dream text is made up of strands of disparate thoughts weaving their way through our minds as we sleep. The loom which allows these threads to be woven together is a narratizing process that is part of human cognition. The dream report is also a text which, as a representation, will reflect the narrative structure of the experienced dream or its absence. But as a linguistic representation, the verbal dream report will also enhance the narrative organization of the dream text. An analogy may be made with the structuring that occurs when we express our waking thoughts in spoken or written language: the content of ideas is in essence the same whether it is expressed or only thought, but expressing thoughts through linguistic representation structures them in specific ways.
Further, dream texts will vary in their degree of narrativity, ranging from fragmentary snapshot to epic tale.6 Some remembered dreams seem less coherent than others, but it is still the case that we remember “a dream”, no matter how bizarre or tenuous the connection between images seems to the waking mind. So, we do not necessarily impose narrative structure on the dream, since we are as capable of reporting a dream with narrative form as without.
For a dream to have narrative form is necessarily for it to have structured content, but not necessarily to have a message in the sense of a lesson.7 However minimally, simple action sequences which begin and end and are ordered with respect to each other, involving characters, settings, and usually the tension of a dilemma, do count as narratives. What we usually call a story is a product of having imposed conventional narrative structures on selected content. But I don’t see that dreams are “trying to become stories” (Hunt 1989:177) so much as they arerudimentary, unrefined stories, 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 is that 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 the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining” and that it is a capacity “indispensable to human cognition generally” (pp. 4-5). Turner speculates that “the linguistic 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 linguistic expression.
The other possibility is that narratizing is a linguistic process, which means that all narratives are the product of verbal thought, and even phenomena such as mime acts and wordless comic strips, while legitimately qualifying as narratives, can nevertheless only be generated and in turn interpreted by language users. I am not here committing to 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 issue which can only be mentioned here (see Kilroe 1999b). If narratizing is a cognitive process independent of language, then narrative-like dreams are not necessarily generated by language. But if narratizing is a linguistic process, then dreams with a narrative quality are either essentially unconscious verbal thoughts illustrated by imagery, or they are a weave of unconscious presentational imagery and representational verbal thought (cf. Hunt 1989).
So one type of dream may consist of a sequence of images illustrating unconscious verbal thoughts, which are the subliminal continuation of the mind chatter that we experience while awake. Not all dreams are necessarily structured this way, but those that are can often be matched to verbally established metaphors, puns, and other linguistic phenomena (Kilroe 1999a). And although dream images may be drawn from and recombined out of nonverbal perceptions stored in memory, it would still be verbal thought that motivates these images to come together to form a text.
From this point of view, disparate strands of verbal thought make up the dreamer’s mental discourse, from scattered impressions to focused preoccupations. These strands are unconsciously woven into narrative form while we sleep, resulting in a discourse of imagery that forms a dream text which we report, usually verbally, as our dream. Opacity between the dream report and the unconscious verbal thoughts prevents the straightforward retrieval of the latter into consciousness.8 It is like trying to tell a story from the illustrations alone and not having access to the verbal text that gave rise to the illustrations in the first place —we may be correct in saying what the author’s story is, or partially correct, or simply mistaken.
In any case, whether dreams are generated by linguistic processes or by nonlinguistic cognitive processes, the study of the form of dreams helps to show that narrative structure is not an artful invention but rather a natural process of the mind.
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