Abstract:
This essay examines dreaming as a challenge to the dichotomy between narrative and episodic conceptions of the self. Drawing on Sartre’s phenomenology of the imaginary, it argues that dreams elude both accounts: dream consciousness is episodic and pre-reflective – reflective awareness that one is dreaming would annihilate the dream – yet dreams are experienced, on Sartre’s insight, as “a story that I am reading or being told.” Refining this claim through Genette’s distinction between récit and histoire, the essay proposes that a dream is a non-narrative storied phenomenon: a wordless récit without plot, author, or narrative distance, experienced in the “pure belief” of a consciousness closed upon itself. Upon waking, the dream solicits narrative configuration, though a fissure persists between the dreaming “me” and the remembering “I.” Literary works by Proust, Queneau, Schnitzler, and Han Kang illustrate this entanglement of dreaming, storytelling, and selfhood.
Keywords:
dreaming, narrative, consciousness, Sartre, personal identity, the self
How to cite:
de Warren, Nicolas. “Are We Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On? Narrative and the Oneiric Imagination.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 10, no. 1 (2026): 11-45. https://doi.org/10.14394/eidos.jpc.2026.0002.
Author:
Nicolas de Warren
Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University
240 Sparks Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5766-0320
njd15@psu.edu
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