Narrative strategies of dream reports: focalization agencies

Dream reports in online English-language journals use two distinct narrative strategies—subjective and objective—that shape how dreamers describe their experiences. The subjective strategy treats the dreaming self as continuous with the narrating self, using internal focalization and minimal spatial cues, making the dream feel like personal experience. The objective strategy treats the dreaming self as separate from the narrating self, employing external focalization and detailed descriptions that signal the dream's distinct, non-real-world nature. Evidentiality markers help readers navigate between dream and waking narrative spaces.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of the narrative strategy in dream reports as a case study of the English language online dream journals. In the research, I deploy focalization and evidentiality as key aspects for the analysis of narrative strategy in dream reports. The analysis focuses on the specific configurations of focalization types in dream narratives. I consider them as marked by possible divergencies of the “I”-of-the-dream from the “I”-of-the-narration as underpinning the difference between dream reports and personal experience stories. I demonstrate that evidentiality markers serve as means of navigation in narrative spaces. They point to the dream nature of a certain space that is distinct from real world. In my research, I single out focalization and evidentiality markers as pivotal in forming narrative strategy of rendering dream experience. It entails the narrative biases towards objectivity or subjectivity. In the research, I demonstrate that in terms of the subjective narrative strategy, the narrator approaches dreaming as a personal experience. This is manifested, first, in the “I”-of-the-dream being collateral to the “I”-of-the-narration as internal focalizing agency and, secondly, in the use of economical deictic means of navigation in narrative spaces. Conversely, the objective narrative strategy, first, involves external focalizing elements, i.e. the “I”-of-the-dream treated as external to the “I”-of-the narration, and secondly, it is manifest in the detailed propositions signaling the dream nature of the narrative space.