Twelve Narrative Features of Dreams
1. Sudden shifts of context, location, characters; associative “logic” vs. linearity.
2. Acceptance of the bizarre as natural vs. nonacceptance/ sense of mystery (from waking logic): why am I
here?
who are
you? why are we here, why are you here? where are we now?
3. Character-shifting and character blending (e.g., your Auntie Em's personality appears in a stranger's
body;
or
aspects of two of your friends are joined in a single dream-character).
4. Point-of-view shifting and dissonance, watching yourself vs. being yourself, third-person vs.
first-person,
distance
vs. nearness.
5. Time shifting; blending of past, present, and future; odd combinations of references from various parts of
your life.
6. Mixing the familiar and the unfamiliar: (a) familiar things in unfamiliar places; (b) unfamiliar things in
familiar
places.
7. Basic simplicity of plot lines (vs. complexity of all this shifting and blending), e.g.: (a) being
pursued;
(b)
trying to get somewhere = someone takes a journey = a stranger comes to town; (c) trying to accomplish a
simple,
specific task and encountering resistance, working against constraints.
8. Infinite variety vs. insurmountable obstacles/nonnegotiable boundaries.
9. You had to be there/the self-contained world: being thrust into a complex set of circumstances (in medias
res) that's
impossible to recall upon waking but which you seemed to fully comprehend in the dream; events only make sense
in the
dream-story context, are not translatable to other media or states of consciousness.
10. Layers of reality and reflexivity and self-referentiality: lucid dreaming, dreaming about dreaming,
dreaming
about
waking up, etc.
11. Lack of conclusion, denouement, resolution.
12. What you say about the dream-story is more revealing than the story itself, insofar as you are able to
reconstruct
it for others.
— Alan Richardson, “Dreams as Narrative: The Dramatic Features of REM Sleep,” Chapter 33
of
Rhetorical Questions for Therapists in the New Millennium,
ed. Mohammed Stout and Floyd Rhomel (Fictitious Press, 1996)
hallucination/dreamvision
