Dreams: The royal road to metaphor

Metaphor, as treated here, is not a rhetorical device or strategy but the p rimary means by which dream and artistic images arise and give rise in turn to further narrative developments. The paper is chiefly concerned with dre ams and the possibility that dream coherence--i.e., meaning, making sense-- as we recognize it in the waking state may be a largely irrelevant to the o rganization and function of dreams which obviously have no artistic mission to be shared by others (readers, auditors) as forms of communication. I ex amine an experiment in dream-splicing conducted by Allan Hobson and his Har vard colleagues with a view to illustrating that bizarreness and discontinu ity in dreams are not necessarily, as Hobson claims, signs of incoherence b ut may be the natural consequence of dreams exercising the power of associa tion while the body is "off-line." If dream images arise from a virtually i nfinite experience in world-association it is possible that dreams couldn't perform their function--whatever it may be--by offering coherent narrative s of the sort that interest waking readers. In other words, the content of dreams--coherent or otherwise from the waking standpoint--may be less impor tant than the act of dreaming itself. Additionally, I briefly discuss two l eading theories of dream function--the recorrelation of memory and the vigi lance theories and suggest, briefly, how they might apply not only to dream s but to artistic works as well.