Dream vision

A literary form in which a narrator’s dream frames an allegorical or reflective narrative, often presenting its ideas through symbolic encounters and imagined journeys.

Frame narrative: A story structure in which one narrative encloses another. The dream supplies an enclosing story for the vision’s central narrative.
The Dream of the Rood: An Old English poem in which a dreamer sees the Cross recount Christ’s crucifixion. The Cross’s speech turns the dream frame into a revelation about sacrifice and salvation.
Somnium Scipionis: A philosophical dream narrative in Cicero’s Republic, in which Scipio Africanus receives a vision of the cosmos. Its framed revelation became a major classical model for later literary dream visions.
Dream allegory: An allegorical narrative presented as a dream, without necessarily emphasizing a frame narrator’s experience. It overlaps with dream vision but can foreground symbolic action over the narrator’s dreaming.
Allegory: A narrative in which characters, events, or settings convey a second, often abstract meaning. Dream visions use symbolic figures and events to express ideas beyond their literal plot.
The Book of the Duchess: Geoffrey Chaucer’s dream poem about a grieving Black Knight and the death of his beloved. Its dreamer encounters a mourner whose story gives shape to the poem’s elegy.
Macrobian dream classification: A late-antique taxonomy distinguishing prophetic and symbolic dreams from ordinary or deceptive ones. Medieval writers inherited categories that shaped how a literary dream could claim significance.
Dream diary: A record of dreams written by someone who experienced them, usually as personal documentation. Unlike a literary dream vision, it need not construct an allegorical plot or poetic speaker.
First-person narrator: A narrator who tells a story using the first-person perspective. The narrator’s reported dream gives the vision its personal point of view.
Pearl: A Middle English dream poem in which a bereaved father debates a heavenly maiden beside a stream. The dream’s allegorical dialogue explores grief, loss, and salvation.

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