Reporting, telling, and showing dreams
Linguistics and Philosophy March 27, 2026 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-026-09454-2 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Dream Syntax Semantics computer science Prefix Sequence biology Operator biology Linguistics Resultative Pragmatics Principle of compositionality |
| Key points | Proposes that dream reports can be analyzed as complex discourse structures using formal discourse semantics, and extends this framework to visual dream reporting in movies and comics. |
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.