Are Dreams Narrative Experiences? How Assumptions About Fictional Narratives Shape Debates on Dream Experiences

The concept of narrative is widespread in the philosophical literature on dreams. Although several works have examined the putative narrative character of dreams by drawing on narratology, literary theory, and semiotics, there has been virtually no investigation of how preconceptions about the resemblance between fictional narratives and retrospective dream reports have shaped the philosophical debate on dreams and dreaming. This paper aims to address this gap. We argue that there is a pervasive tendency to metonymically assimilate fictional narratives first with dream reports and then with dreams themselves. As a result, features and devices typically associated with literary fiction are frequently used as a speculative explanatory framework to understand dreams and the processes underlying their formation, encoding, and retrieval. To illuminate this tendency, we focus on two central categories in the philosophy of dreaming: authorship and composition. By examining relevant cases in which these categories are employed to support divergent ontological and epistemological claims, we argue that similar accounts rest on a shared—yet frequently unacknowledged—assumption: that dreams exhibit a narrative structure and that dreaming is, at its core, a process of narrative construction. Through our conceptual analysis, we aim to lay the groundwork for further exploration of the emergence of narrative thinking in spontaneous thought, encompassing both wakefulness and sleep.