'I Had a Dream, Which Was not All a Dream'

Abstract

The article makes a case for a particular kind of conceptual metaphor, the viewpoint metaphor. The viewpoint metaphor is argued to be a tool employed by narrators in personal experience narratives in order to render their irregular perception mode. The viewpoint metaphor allows mapping on the narrated real experience the perception characteristics of other experiences such as watching a movie or having a dream. The research material consisted of a sample of 50 personal experience narratives (25 in English and 25 in Ukrainian) produced by the participants or witnesses, military and civilian, of hostilities mainly in Ukraine in 2014-2023 and in some other conflicts. It was found that two basic and most prominent viewpoint metaphors in this kind of discourse is EXPERIENCING THE EVENT is DREAMING OF THE EVENT or WATCHING A MOVIE OF THE EVENT. These metaphors are often reinforced by other viewpoint metaphors and they tend to repeatedly occur in the narrative. The function of the viewpoint metaphor is expressing the subjective experientiality, emotional condition and embodied perception mode at the time of the experience narrated. Viewpoint is therefore argued to be a part of the mental space’s construal. Studying the viewpoint metaphor allows to shed light onto the conceptual structure of viewpoint. It was found that the elements mapped from the source experience of watching a movie or having a dream include passive witnessing, reduced agency, hushed perception, unreality of events, timelapse, and slow motion.