Valeriia O. Nikolaienko
PhD in Philology, Associate Professor at the Department of English Philology
and Foreign Language Teaching Methods
V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University,
Kharkiv, Ukraine
e-mail: v.o.nikolaienko@karazin.ua
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5056-271X
Scopus ID: 59511541500
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24195/2616-5317-2025-41.15
SUMMARY
The article examines the phenomenon of ekphrasis in English- language dream reports, drawing on a cognitive approach to intermediality and the verbal representation of visual experience. Based on a corpus of over 60,000 user-generated dream reports from dreamjournal.net (over 22 million words), the study traces how features of artistic ekphrasis, typically associated with literary discourse, emerge and are reinterpreted within the specific context of dream narration. The paper introduces the concept of oneiric ekphrasis—a verbal representation of relatively static visual dream images perceived by the dreamer as aesthetic or art-like. Using a corpus-based methodology, the study identifies patterns of linguistic realization and classifies the main types of such descriptions. Concordance analysis of the lemma ‘painting’ yielded four main categories of oneiric ekphrasis: static and dynamic, as well as visual and synesthetic. The findings reveal characteristic cognitive tendencies, including the instability and fluidity of visual imagery, narrator metareflection, intermedial blending of modalities, and reliance on cultural precedents. Ekphrasis in dream narratives is thus interpreted as a cognitive operation of recoding internal visual representations into verbal form, extending the traditional understanding of ekphrasis from a depiction of an artistic object to a mode of thinking and imagining. It is concluded that dreams, due to their high visual and emotional intensity, often generate narrations that resemble aesthetic or artistic descriptions, where the dreamer acts not only as a storyteller but also as an intermedial translator and interpreter of their own imaginative experience.
Key words: ekphrasis, oneiric experience, intermediality, cognitive linguistics
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