Reporting, telling, and showing dreams

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract Dreams are not real, so when we recount them we prefix an intensional operator like ‘I dreamed that ...’. Linguists will analyze this construction in terms of clausal complementation syntax and possible worlds semantics. But talking about a dream is often more like telling a story, with a potentially complex discourse structure (involving propositional discourse units connected by coherence relations like Narration , Background , and Explanation ) that is hard to fit inside a single syntactically embedded that -clause (or a sequence of independently embedded clauses). I show how we can analyze actual, complex dream report stories using a formal discourse semantics framework. I then explore how to extend this discourse framework to visual dream reporting, like in movies and comics, where it’s not immediately clear that we even have any intensional operators or embeddings to begin with.