AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

The concept of narrative is widespread in the literature on dreams, spanning the humanities, psychology, and cognitive science. Yet, this term and its associated conceptual aspects often remain undefined and insufficiently investigated. Although several works have examined the putative narrative character of dreams by drawing on narratology, literature 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 to dream reports and then to dreams themselves. As a result, features and devices typically associated with literary fiction are frequently used as a significant conceptual 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. These categories often structure debates concerning the ontology and epistemology of dreams. By examining relevant cases in which these categories are employed to support divergent theoretical positions, we argue that similar accounts often 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.