A Study Of Metaphorical Mapping Between Dream And Reality

Dream is a subject that has been studied for thousand years. Different fields enjoy fruitful accomplishments of dream researches, especially fields like religion, medicine and psychology which greatly enlighten this thesis. This thesis reviews related studies in these three fields in the wake of discovering some shortcomings so as to lead us to seek for a new angle to explain dreams, namely cognitive linguistics. Lakoff & Johnson (1980:1), in the book Metaphors We Live By, put forward "Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." "The essence of metaphor is under-standing and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.", which suggests that metaphor is not only a language phenomenon but also a kind of thinking mode and cognition. Meanwhile, scholars like George Lakoff and Liu Yuhong regard dream images as a metaphorical phenomenon.Under the close association between dreams and metaphor, this thesis selects Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Integration Theory (Fauconnier 1994) that are persuasive among metaphorical theories to discover the relation between dreams and reality. Due to some differences in terms of running process, constructive units, mapping ways, focused points, mapping orientation and Invariance Principle and Proximity Principle, these two theories are applied in researches into different dreams respectively. In the course of comparing study, we find that this metaphorical method makes best use of the advantages and bypasses the disadvantages of previous ones. First, the disadvantage of previous method is the problem of universality of research objects. Second, since dreams always work as an expression in literary works, this metaphorical method offers a novel thinking angle, which makes interdisciplinary study come true. Of course, there still are some shortcomings of this metaphorical method:experiential basis and Invariance Principle.This study not only finds a new angle to explain dreams, but also broadens vision and finds out inadequacies so as to improve the studies on the topic of dreams and expands the development of cognitive linguistics by comparing previous methods and the metaphorical one.