Dream Narratives Research Articles

Content determination in dreams supports the imagination theory

AbstractThere are two leading theories about the ontology of dreams. One holds that dreams involve hallucinations and beliefs. The other holds that dreaming involves sensory and propositional imagining. I highlight two features of dreams which are more easily explained by the imagination theory. One is that certain things seem to be true in our dreams, even though they are not represented sensorily; this is easily explained if dreams involve propositional imagining. The other is that dream narratives can be temporally segmented, involving events which take place across long spans of time; this makes sense if dreams involve sensory imagining, for we often sensorily imagine narratives during wakefulness in the same way. The two considerations are unified by the fact that both highlight forms of content determination characteristic of imagining.

Safeguarding, uncertainty and new possibilities: an appreciative inquiry into personal adviser’s relational practice with care leavers

Purpose An appreciative inquiry process was collaboratively undertaken with an inner city local authority and personal advisors where systemic social work practice was embedded. The purpose of this study is to explore how systemic social work principles could be integrated into the support of young adults leaving the care system, especially when safeguarding concerns exist. Design/methodology/approach Three fortnightly, reflecting team-style, appreciative inquiry workshops explored the integration into practice of systemic concepts under the themes of safeguarding, uncertainty and new possibilities. Findings Within the contexts of the organisation, other agencies and the relationship, six paired themes emerged: learning and navigating; positioning and risk-taking; and feeling and engaging. Core systemic concepts, such as self-reflexivity and mutual influence, can enable personal advisers to use themselves and their relationship with care leavers as a context for change. Considering responses to risk from different family member positions may support holding greater levels of uncertainty. Seeing resilience as a process rather than a personal attribute enabled personal advisors to think about how they connected with care leavers through shared life experiences, fostering narratives of hopes and dreams where new possibilities abound. Research limitations/implications Appreciative inquiry is generally seen as a defined model for implementing large organisational changes; this study comprised a small sample group, and the model’s application was less defined. Originality/value A gap exists in the extensive care leaver research, addressing safeguarding and working systemically. A conceptual model for practice is offered, with potential utility in developing further systemically informed training and supervision for practitioners. A less structured and more relationally engaged model for appreciative inquiry is presented.

The Virgin’s Body and the Sheikh’s Head

The village of Bansko, in the Republic of North Macedonia, is known in historical-ethnological studies for its Muslim heterodox community. The Eastern Orthodox Macedonian community in the village started to gain visibility since the 1950s, to become dominant in the last decades. The village provides a good example of how the dynamics of religious communities living together is revealed through the activities of local religious virtuosi, who interpret and even may influence processes of peaceful or conflictual coexistence. This article is based on fieldwork conducted between 1999 and 2006, primarily focusing on a local female Christian-Orthodox seer whose activities, based on dream revelations, led to a Christian-Orthodox re-interpretation of the local religioscape. The latter consists in a dense network of Christian and Muslim holy places, whose making is evoked through legends and narratives of dreams and visions. Here, the legends around a miracle-working icon of Theotokos believed to be the Virgin’s body, and the disputes over the wooden sculptured head of a sheik that marked the place of his tomb, are used as metaphors to describe the shifting relationship between the two religious communities over time.

Dreams, memories, and the psychoanalytic process

Freud believed the dreamer’s wish amounted to the most powerful motive underlying all dreaming processes. Ángel Garma suggested traumatic memories might play a similar or even greater role. In the present paper, I extend Garma’s suggestion and propose that unconscious memories of interpersonal interactions are the basic components of dream narratives. Within this perspective, latent dream content includes a wealth of information about the unconscious experience of the transference situation. Through a clinical vignette, I show the reader how appropriate transference interpretations allow the identification of such transferential emotions and their reintegration within the psychoanalytic field.

Immigrant's death at the border: Do they influence White and Latinx Americans’ belief in the American dream?

AbstractIn this study, we test a clashing narrative approach to conflict, which argues that political conflict is based on opposing narratives that negate one another. We focus on the role of two master narratives central to political schism in the United States. The first is the American dream narrative, which posits that anyone who works hard can become successful in the United States. The opposing narrative, the systemic racism narrative, argues that the United States is a racist country where minorities are systemically held back. A survey study of 189 participants demonstrated that these two master narratives predict support for the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump or Joe Biden above and beyond more traditional ideological dispositions such as right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. In a follow‐up experiment (n = 157), we examined how the Trump's administration policies of increased surveillance and policing of Latino immigrants crossing the border influenced White and Latinx participants’ agreement with the narrative of the American dream and the United States as a systemically racist country. Findings suggest that when confronted with news clips of immigrant death at the border, Latinx participants, compared to White participants, increased their endorsement of the American dream narrative. Conversely, White participants, increased their endorsement of the United States as a systemically racist country compared to Latinx participants. The results of this study help us understand support for the Republican party among Latinx voters.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941): The American Gulliver or Deconstructing the American Dream

In my paper, I will focus on the director Preston Sturges’ intervention in the Depression-era comedy, rooted in the satirical format of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in an attempt to highlight the ways in which his revolutionary approach to narrative and character undermined the coherence of representations of the Ameri can Dream. Preston introduced non-linearity and Naturalistic and Absurdist elements in typical comedy formats (like the screwball comedy), thus challenging the veracity of American Dream narratives. Sullivan’s Travels (1941), in which socially conscious endeavors only prolong social misery and unrest, postpones narrative resolution to the point of becoming the ultimate deconstruction of the American Dream. Moreover, Preston Sturges’ movies play with narrative in such a way as to unravel the constructedness of the American Dream. By choosing to foreground moral ambivalence over clear-cut categorizations, his films delight in the characters’ misadventures without passing moral judgment. Rooted in genuine feeling rather than prescribed reactions, Sturges’ movies lend a paradoxically empathetic skepticism to the interpretation of the American Dream, privileging humanity over stereotype.

Narrative Thinking Oriented Content and Diagram

Abstract The development of contemporary mobile Internet and new media has ushered in a new paradigm of narrative and communication forms. This paper takes the performance of narrative thinking as an entry point and establishes a framework for narrative thinking design by combining the narrative design process and digital technology. Narrative theme analysis is carried out in text narrative and image narrative. The text narrative is characterized by the LDA theme model for extracting narrative theme features. Then the LSTM model is used to classify the emotion of the extracted narrative theme. The visual features of an image narrative are extracted by a self-attention mechanism, combined with a Net VLAD algorithm for feature aggregation, and a compression excitation context gating unit and classifier are introduced to achieve sentiment classification. For the application of narrative thinking design, the news event of MH370 and the elementary school students of A elementary school in S city are taken as the research objects to explore the content and illustration of narrative thinking. The study shows that narrative thinking design can clarify the news event’s specific emotional expression and visualization illustration. The coefficient of the dream narrative theme is 0.317 in the elementary school students’ narrative theme change. The score of the positive emotion is 0.349±0.205, which is 0.024 points lower than the negative emotion. Using narrative thinking to analyze the content and illustrations can identify specific changes, thus improving the corresponding narrative design.

A Study of the Narrative Method and Philosophical Core of Suspense Films - A Case Study of the Practice Suspense Short Film Symmetrical Composition

The tone of suspense films is one of suspense, with a greater focus on breaking stereotypes in artistic production and viewing modes than in the genre in general. This paper focuses on the description and analysis of the short suspense film Symmetrical Composition in terms of both its presentation and its content. On this basis, it focuses on the prominent element of dreams in suspense films and analyses the deep subconscious and desires of human beings contained in dreams in depth. It also uses narrative theory to examine how suspense films can use the idea and mechanism of the dream world to construct more exciting suspense stories. On the other hand, it draws on cognitive construct theory to point out the cognitive difficulties of dream narratives in suspense films, and how techniques such as story lines, logical narratives and detailed cues can be used to make the films exciting to watch without confusing the audience. The paper concludes with a summary of the practical experience of suspense films on how dream narratives are presented and their reference value for academic research.

Patterns of evidentials use in dream narratives

The article presents a study on evidentials use in dream reports collected from online dream journals. First, I discuss the relation between the categories of stance and evidentiality. Specifically, I define evidentiality for the needs of this research as a semantic category that labels the source of information in the English language. Evidentiality encompasses perception, reportative evidentiality, and inferential judgment. The role of evidentials in rendering the dream experience is considerable due to the quasi-perceptual and specific experientiality of dreaming. Therefore, the core categories of evidentiality were singled out for this study, such as revelative, sensory and sensory-inferential, reportative, non-sensory inferential and mirative (marking unexpected information). The sample was then manually processed to count the relative frequencies of the means rendering these subcategories of evidentiality. The main findings reside in the role of revelative evidentials in marking the status of dream vs. real narrative spaces. Additionally, the classic assumption about the visuality of dreams was confirmed by the high number of visual perceptual evidentials, while audial and other perceptual mode instances are much fewer in the sample. Finally, the choice of evidential subcategories in dream reports is conditioned by the narrators’ need to account for vague recollection of dreaming experience with the preference for simpler inferential forms. In turn, the category of mirativity (i.e. labeling of unexpected information) is discussed as a prospective research avenue due to its rich potential in subtle yet informative marking of the speaker’s reaction to the information communicated or to the channel of obtaining it.

Motif Index of Prophetic Dream Narratives: Methods of Compilation

The article proposes methods for describing and classifying invariant structures of stories about prophetic dreams in the form of a motif index. The author raises the question of what elements of prophetic dream narratives can be defined as folkloric and introduces a classification system of prophetic dream narratives (according to their invariants). Revealing invariants (narrative structures) in the prophetic dream narratives allows the author to create a motif index, which lets us understand the traditional logic of dream interpretation: the rules of generating prophetic dream narratives and the ‘narrative grammar’ lying in the core of stories about prophetic dreams. The motif index covers stories about prophetic dreams recorded by ethnographers and folklorists in the Eastern Slavic regions from the early twentieth century to 2020.

｢구운몽｣의 서사관습과 현대적 변용

This paper examines how the narrative structure and the dream narrative of Guunmong has been transformed into a modern web drama. First, the identity of the narrative structure of Guunmong and the variable nature of the dream narrative was examined. Subsequently, the pattern of the modern variation of Guunmong was reviewed by citing The Youngest Son of the Chaebol Family. Finally, the narrative custom of Guunmong was grasped from a literary and historical perspective. The above is summarized as follows. First, the structural identity of Guunmong and the variability of the dream narrative were confirmed. While inheriting the existing tradition of Mong-yu(dream) narrative, Guunmong has made a breakthrough in terms of mass. Meanwhile, the structural identity of Mong-yu novels was established, and the diversity of the dream narrative, a virtual world, could be transformed at any time. This is why Guunmong was able to be reprocessed according to the situation of the times. Second, the relationship between the variations of narrative techniques and The Youngest Son of the Chaebol Family was reviewed. The world transformed from deficiency to fulfillment. Guunmong allowed Yang So-yu to satisfy Sung-jin's lack of love in the virtual world, and The Youngest Son of the Chaebol Family allowed Yoon Hyun-woo, who was economically deficient, to become Jin Do-jun of the virtual world and live a fulfilling life. Next, the character was transformed from status to capital. In shaping the character, if Guunmong presented a medieval status as a privilege, The youngest son of a chaebol family made a change in presenting modern wealth as a vested interest. Then the character is awakened from the illusion and returned to reality. In Guunmong, Yang So-yu returned as a lonely monk after finishing his secular wealth and honor, while The Youngest Sn of a Chaebol Family transformed Jin Do-jun to return to Yoon Hyun-woo in reality after achieving all the economic things. Finally, through the transformation of fatalism, the future was predicted. If Yang So-yu of Guunmong. followed the trajectory of life according to his given fate, Jin Do-jun of The Youngest Son of the Chaebol Family was sent back to the past where Yoon Hyun-woo lived and was able to predict the future. Third, the narrative customs and literary and historical status of Guunmong was examined. Guunmong is a Momg-yu novel that creates a unique structure of reality-virtual-reality and the practice of dealing with various narrative types, which became a custom Due to this, various derivatives could be produced in the late Joseon Dynasty. It can also be useful in modern literature that have fantastic nature. This is because the narrative structure of Guunmong and various dream narratives can be transformed to capture modern problems intensely. Such a work is The Youngest Son of the Chaebol Family. Considering this, the narrative custom of Guunmong had a long tradition, and it is also worth paying attention to in terms of literary history that it has developed into video literature.

How to build a “Dream” in political speech? A critical discourse analysis of the discursive construction of the Chinese Dream speech

ABSTRACT This paper examines how Chinese politician tactically builds a dream narrative in political speech, namely, the Chinese Dream. By combining the discourse-historical approach, corpus-assisted methods and framing analysis, the study forms a complementary framework to examine the discursive construction of the Chinese Dream in President Xi Jinping’s representative speeches between 2012 and 2022. It identifies four key thematic representations, i.e. NATIONAL REJUVENATION, CPC’S LEGITIMACY, CHINESE PEOPLE’S INTERESTS and WORLD’S INTERESTS and also finds that the strategies of nomination, predication, argumentation and perspectivization are skillfully used and reveals the Chinese-centric narrative frame. Beyond that, it further discusses Chineseness in the dream narrative. The paper argues that the Chinese Dream is an artificially discursive construct in a grand narrative used to build an ultimate national consensus and to serve the ideological legitimacy of the ruling class.

Morpheus: Dreamscape architectural operations

This study explores the narrative of dreams as a basis of architectural design operation. This study positions its exploration within a dreamscape; or a surrealist situation that becomes the basis of architectural design. Current architectural discourse has explored design based on some structured and rigid operations. However, understanding dreamscape as a design medium positions the importance of explorative and unstructured operations as the basis of the alternative spatial narrative. Morpheus is a title of experimental architecture programming in this design study which is driven by a series of speculative dream operations. This study employs dream narratives to develop architectural programming languages, from the initial exploration to the materialisation of its architecture. In this study, architecture emerge as an experimental instrument based on speculative and unstructured operations of dreamscape, as an alternative method in constructing narrative relationships.

Kara Walker: A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be

Following exhibits in Basel and Frankfurt, Kara Walker’s show A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be: Drawings 1992–2020 is on display in the De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art in Tilburg, The Netherlands. New works on paper alongside a selection from Walker’s private archives compose a treasure trove of well over 600 drawings, experimental writings, personal notes, dream narratives, sheets of textual and visual play, found objects, and scrolls. Incontrovertibly finished pieces appear side by side with try-outs, gestures, studies, and sketches. Occupying the halls of a former textile factory, they proclaim the ongoing process of making, a lot more making, and then trajectories of other kinds of making: new forms, new directions. The viewer soaks up the existential inquisitiveness permeating the artist’s encounter with language and the world: with concrete political developments and incidents in the news but also with the colonialist tools, identity constructions, and racial and gender elisions honed by centuries of Western art. A spirit of playful investigation and rambunctious humour hails from many works. Lightness is seldom absent. It is an aspect of the works’ depth of curiosity. Gravity and levity fuel each other in engagement with ferociously difficult subjects, carried by form and language (Figure 1). A compellingly anti-heroic notion of cultural agency emerges from this subjective richness, which veils neither pleasure nor racial and sexual atrocity. One expects this affective intensification and conceptual rigour from Walker, but it is a stunning accomplishment when it flows forth from a massive turn to the artist’s archive.

Analysis of the metaphorical meanings of symbols in Milan Kundera’s novels

Abstract Milan Kundera is one of the most influential writers in contemporary world literature. In his novels, there are many symbolic metaphors related to numbers, dreams, and animals. Combing through the plots of Kundera’s novels, we can discover that among all the numbers, seven and twenty are used most frequently. These two numbers have rich metaphorical meanings. Besides, there are many other digital metaphors in Kundera’s novels, including 6, 4, etc. Apart from number symbols, Kundera has also inserted various kinds of dream symbols in his artistic creation. For Kundera, dreams are not just an individual’s physical and psychological activities, but also a continuation and supplement of real life. It can be concluded that dream narration is a perfect medium for the author to express his philosophical ideology. In addition, dream symbols also serve as an important medium for Kundera to demonstrate narrative skills and present important themes. In Kundera’s novels, animal symbols are integrated with the plots, revealing the personal traits of the relevant characters, and mirroring their spiritual world at the same time. Besides, Kundera also expressed his ecological ethics through the narration of animals’ death. In conclusion, the metaphorical meanings of different symbols in Kundera’s novels play an active role in highlighting the themes, revealing the inner thoughts of the characters, showing the special features of the characters, and expressing the author’s philosophical thoughts. These symbols help Kundera to break the limitations of time and space, which has become an important part of his polyphonic art. What’s more, Kundera has also tried to expand the original metaphorical meanings of these symbols to create some new poetic meanings.

When the Chinese Dream Meets Chinese Dream Show: Reconstructing Dream Narratives in the Name of Public Interest Talent Shows

This paper primarily explores the manner in which China’s reality talent shows have rearticulated dream narratives surrounding the Chinese Dream political discourse. This has occurred in response to common perceptions of such shows as vulgar or culturally inappropriate, which themselves were a consequence of the post-2005 boom in popularity of Super Girl Voice. My analysis is contextualised within the ideological connotations of the Chinese Dream, and falls into three main sections. The first section investigates the discursive strategy of the Chinese Dream, which can be said to integrate Confucianism and nationalism into the framework of a neoliberal market so as to emphasise the consistency between national and individual dreams, as well as the important and positive aspects of market values in the socialist agenda of public affairs. The second and third parts examine a public interest talent show called Chinese Dream Show. Through a discourse analysis of this talent show, I argue that the show is neoliberal theatre with Chinese characteristics, wherein a discursive formula I call ‘public interest’ employs two intertwined discursive systems – neoliberal rationality and sentimentality – to narrate dream-realising stories that satisfy the needs of both political correctness and market interests.

The Folktale Narrator at the Turn of the 20th – 21st Century: the Case of Antanina Čaplikienė from Subartonys

In the course of the fieldwork in 2000, researchers from the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore encountered a villager from Subartonys (Varėna district) Antanina Glaniauskaitė-Čaplikienė (1922–2016). In the course of five subsequent years, they recorded from her 140 folk narratives altogether (including 69 folktales, 9 folk-belief legends, 3 place legends, 6 dream narratives, 40 biographical narratives, and several anecdotes). The major part of the Čaplikienė’s repertoire consisted of folktales that were rather well known in the Lithuanian culture, including a number of narratives typical for the Dzūkija region. The author is curious about the ways that Čaplikienė managed to preserve such a vivid folkloric memory. In order to elucidate this, she uses the branch of the contextual research on storytelling developed by the Hungarian folklorist Linda Dégh – namely, the folktale biology (Märchenbiology). The study focuses on these aspects: 1) in view of the Dzūkija folklore tradition in general and the Čaplikienė’s life in particular that shaped her as a storyteller, the woman’s narrative repertoire is discussed, including the number and genre affiliation of her stories, and their place in the Lithuanian folk narrative tradition; 2) Čaplikienė’s memories regarding the folktale narration in the past are analyzed, including the sources that she had learnt her pieces from, and her mode of communication with the folklorists that recorded her tales. The aim of the article is to highlight the uniqueness of this storyteller at the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries and in the context of the folk narrative tradition of Dzūkija.

Dreams in the Bible and in Modern English Discourse: A Shift in Perspective

This paper investigates the linguistic aspect of the phenomenon of secularisation, using as example the English word “dream.” Comparative analysis of the linguistic structure of the dream narratives in the Bible and in modern English texts allowed us to discern two major secularisation trends—humanizing the divine and mystifying the human. In the Bible, entering into contact with the divine while asleep is always evaluated ambivalently: one is fascinated by the great favour and fears for one’s life. In modern religious discourse, the growing number of dream narratives manifest the positive evaluation of the contact with the divine as comforting. The second tendency consists in the transfer of transcendental experiences from the religious sphere into the sphere of narratives describing human mind and emotions. Here, the ambivalent experience springs up from the mysterious depths of the subconscious. At the lexical level, both tendencies result in new senses of the word “dream” as well as in important changes in the narrative structure of texts relating dream experiences. In the end, we provide a dictionary entry for the English noun “dream”.

The extended unconscious group field and metabolization of pandemic experience: dreaming together to keep cohesion alive.

Working with dreams in groups allows an understanding of phenomena that characterise the unconscious as a total unity. The dreamer becomes the vehicle of emotions, fantasies, and anxieties that dominate the group at a given moment, allowing them to be understood and processed. The analysis of shared dreams can further our understanding of emotional concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its psychological repercussions. Six sessions of social dreaming were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Our aim was not to investigate differences between and within groups: the analysis was performed by identifying the core themes encompassing the contents of dreaming sessions, as products constructed by and within groups that are informative of society's collective unconscious more broadly. The narratives were transcribed and thematic analysis was performed with the support of Atlas.ti software. Three main themes were identified: i) nightmares' descriptions and the links with the COVID-19 pandemic; ii) loss of control within the unexpected outbreak: the pandemic as a learned helplessness context and environmental mastery as an emergent psychological issue; and iii) recalls of the child-past as continuity-makers within the continuity-breaking pandemic present. Through the qualitative analysis of dream narratives, we identified the links between individuals and the shared field. It is arguable that, by sharing dreams, the members of the group develop meanings useful to process the painful experience that unites them, as the three main themes show.

Temporary Couples? A Chinese Migrant's Dream Narrative

SummaryThis piece presents a narration of a dream by a rural migrant, Yang Cui, who works in the city of Shantou in China. It reveals her inner struggles to end an affair with another migrant worker, Lao Bo. This piece is written as a part of an ethnographic book project on rural–urban migration in China, in which I experiment with different genres of writing in an attempt to address migrants' bewildering existential multiplicity of interior experience, among which some are presented more analytically, some more subjectively, and some more imaginatively. Understanding the human condition in terms of the limits of knowing others and ourselves requires anthropologists to seek creative forms of ethnographic narrative to give shape and voice to existential struggles, ambivalence, and uncertainty of everyday life. This piece attempts to use Yang Cui's narration of her dream as an evocative form of describing her inner struggles being with Lao Bo as a so‐called linshi fuqi (“temporary couple”), through which her self‐knowledge unfolds, reflection takes place, and consciousness finds expression.