preview

Dreams And Dreams Essay

Decent Essays

Dreams, what they mean and what they are, are questions that have long been in the philosophical discourse, these questions even branching out into the fields psychology and biology. However, one question about dreams that hasn’t been asked is if the dream is a kind of art, and narrowing it down for the purposes of this paper, if dreams are a kind of fiction. This question has effects and implications and influences in so many fields of philosophy that answering it will be kept to the essentials of the argument. In this paper, I will examine the question if a dream is a fiction, how and if dreams and film are related, and I will conclude that by examination of the similarities and distinctions that exist between fictions and dreams …show more content…

The next portion is to attempt to define what a fiction is, and here I will use Gregory Currie’s essay What is Fiction? In it, he argues that fictions are engaging in games of make-belief, an idea present in Kendall Walton’s Fearing Fictionality article. The main crux of Currie’s definition is intentionality. He argues that the creator of the fiction not only intends to have the audience engage in games of make-belief but that they will also do it as a result of understanding that intention. He also argues that the creator intends for the reader to make-believe the fiction, through the uses of props, be it the sentences, actors, et cetera. She intends them to make-believe the fiction partly as a recognition of the intent to make-believe the work as a fiction. So the audience understands the work as fiction because they perceive it as fiction. He argues that it can be recognized or perceived as fiction through the use of advertisement that the work is a fiction, that the work includes elements familiar to fiction, or that the author can explicitly state that a particular work is a fiction through deliberate word or stylistic choices. He does make it clear that this intention can go awry, that the audience and community can misconstrue the intention of the author, and can even go so far that the community around the fiction attributes the status of fiction towards the fiction, regardless of the intention of the creator. It is

Get Access