Knowra Dream narrative Dream narrative A story structured as a dream or dreamlike experience, often allowing discontinuous scenes, unstable identities, and events that violate ordinary logic.
Dream logic : A mode of association in which images and events connect through shifting, nonliteral relations rather than consistent reasoning. It supplies the associative rules that let a dream narrative move between disconnected events.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland : Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel follows Alice through a world governed by unstable scale, identity, language, and logic. Its framed adventure is revealed as a dream, making dreamlike reversals part of its structure.
Frame story : A narrative structure in which an outer story introduces or encloses one or more inner stories. A frame can identify a dream as a contained episode, while dream narratives may blur that boundary.
One Thousand and One Nights : A collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian tales linked by Scheherazade's nightly storytelling to Shahryar. Its embedded tales illustrate how a dream episode can sit inside a larger frame of storytelling.
Discontinuous narrative : A narrative form that presents events out of chronological order or with gaps between them. Its breaks and leaps resemble the abrupt transitions common in dreams.
The Interpretation of Dreams : A 1900 book by Sigmund Freud that presents a theory of dreams as disguised fulfillments of wishes. Freud's account interprets dream content psychologically, unlike a literary dream narrative's open-ended construction.
Magic realism : A narrative mode that presents extraordinary or supernatural events as ordinary within a recognizably real setting. Magic realism normalizes marvels in a shared world; dream narratives often make reality itself unstable.
Kafkaesque : An adjective for oppressive, disorienting situations marked by opaque authority and helplessness, associated with Franz Kafka's fiction. Kafkaesque works often use nightmare-like situations to intensify bureaucratic and existential pressures.
Unreliable narrator : A narrator whose account cannot be fully trusted because of limited knowledge, bias, deception, or impaired perception. Uncertain perception can make a dream narrative's account impossible to take literally.
The Circular Ruins : A short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a man who dreams another person into existence. Its nested act of dreaming makes the boundary between dreamer and dreamed central to the plot.
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