Abstract

When we recount our dreams we may prefix an intensional operator like ‘I dreamt that’. Semanticists have spent some time exploring subtle readings of pronouns under such operators, explaining them within the familiar framework of clausal embedding syntax with possible worlds operator semantics. But verbally reconstructing a dream is often more like telling a full-fledged story, with a potentially complex discourse structure (involving propositional discourse units connected by coherence relations like Narration, Background, Elaboration, etc) that is hard to fit inside a single syntactically embedded that-clause. I show how we may analyze actual dream report stories using a formal discourse semantics framework (viz. SDRT with a non-veridical Attribution relation). I then show that this discourse approach naturally extends to visual dream reporting, like in movies and comics, without assuming hidden intensional operators at the visual syntax/semantics interface.