Reporting, telling, and showing dreams
Linguistics and Philosophy March 27, 2026 Emar Maier
Dream reports are not simple descriptions of unreal events; they are structured stories that use complex discourse relations such as Narration, Background, and Explanation, which cannot be easily captured by a single embedded clause. This analysis applies formal discourse semantics to both verbal dream reports and visual dream reporting in movies and comics, where intensional operators like 'I dreamed that...' may be absent. The work argues that understanding dream narratives requires a discourse-level framework rather than just syntactic or possible-worlds semantic approaches.