What is Dream Narrative?
- Neil Mach
- Jan 13
- 3 min read
A dream narrative is a plot-driven framework, presented as a series of events with identifiable characters and believable themes, yet the events are experienced within a person's dream.
Have you ever had a similar discussion to this?
Last night, I had an odd dream.
Was it a sexy dream?
No, it was simply strange.
What took place?
I was on a beach with you and a manager from work, and we were concerned about the rising tide. My manager suggested we move to higher ground to avoid being drenched by a tidal wave, so you took an airship out of your picnic basket. We climbed into the basket, and your airship carried us to a mountain ledge where a giant eagle had laid an enormous egg. Then it started to rain. I woke up at that point.
What does it all mean?
Who knows? Maybe I'm worried about something at work...
What you attempted to re-tell to your friend (in the extract above) was a dream narrative. But what is dream narrative?
It's a plot-driven framework of jumbled ideas that arrives 'presented' as a series of events that have identifiable characters and believable themes, yet those events appeared in a dream.
A dream narrative frequently has a beginning, a middle, and sometimes a conclusion too. No matter how intangible or weird the dream story seems to be, an unconscious mind will "edit things together" to make sense of strange and disjointed dream data.
Dream narrative is the conscious remembering and later re-interpretation of a dream and the narrative flow of the dream allows a person to explain their dream (to themselves and others) because the dream is equipped with a cohesive storyline, even though some aspects of that storyline seem disorganized and bizarre.
Dream narratives frequently follow a reasonable plot with identifiable characters, logical activities, and a believable conclusion.
In dream narrative, a person's unconscious mind combines experiences, feelings, and recognisable visuals into the storyline.
It's been proposed that the narrative aspects of dreaming, perhaps recurrent characters or awkward circumstances (such becoming lost or being discovered naked in public), might represent a dreamer's unfiltered emotional state, or might be an attempt to deal with real life worries.
A mental process known as secondary revisioning occurs when the narrative dream content is arranged (by the dreamer) into something that approximates a coherent real-life experience.
When we describe our dreams as narrative plays, we sometimes discover that the experience is more like an immersive game or a multisensory movie than a storybook tale. We might also find that the dream itself becomes more conflated and distorted each time we try to repeat the re-telling of it (to ourselves and others).
What's been your experience with dream narrative?
I have described, in detail, dream narrative in my clean urban fantasy thriller, Moondog and the Dark Arches (book two in the Moondog series.)
Neil Mach is a prolific English author known for his clean urban fantasy fiction (like his popular 'Moondog' series) and his historical works. Neil also works as a public speaker, and a creativity advisor. He shares his expertise on writing and the music business, particularly rock music history, and has written popular fiction with a focus on strong female characters set within recognisable urban settings. He's written over 20 books, and often addresses writing workshops. Neil has a background as a rock journalist.
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