Dreams, Narrative, and Liminal Cognition

This volume presents a novel interdisciplinary framework for investigating dreaming and liminal cognition by bringing together narrative theory, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the humanities. It asks how our enactive and waking experience of reality permeates into dream-worlds and vice versa, and what makes dreams immersive, world-like, and narrative in character. Drawing on the work of the research programme Threshold Worlds, the volume employs multiple methodologies—co-constructed exploratory models, experimental designs, phenomenological enquiry, and interpretation of large-scale dream-report datasets. The thematic core revolves around narrativity, permeability, immersivity and reportability of dream experience, as well as the relationships between dreams, mind-wandering, hallucination and fictional worlds. Contributors from cognitive science, psychiatry, narrative studies, theology, and the arts probe how dreaming reveals structures of the self, consciousness and imagination. Ultimately, the book argues that dreams are liminal cognitive states that challenge conventional boundaries between waking and sleeping, fiction and reality, self-model and world-model. By integrating methods across disciplines, the volume offers a transferable framework for understanding how narrative, cognition and immersion entwine in dream-worlds—and invites further empirical, theoretical and creative work at the thresholds of mind.