Abstract
Despite their ubiquity as shared social phenomena, limited sociological attention has been given to dreams. Moreover, where dreams have been considered, there is a tendency to treat the talk that is generated in dream telling settings as a resource from which analytical and theoretical claims are made, rather than perceiving it as a topic in its own right. Furthermore, the sociological literature tends to treat culture as being reflected in dreams. The thesis remedies these problems by treating talk about dreams, collected in interviews about dreams, and interviews about sleep and recovery, as its central phenomenon. It combines conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to examine the sequential and categorial practices members of these settings use to produce, negotiate, and manage representations of self. The thesis aims to further develop the trajectory of work that brings CA and MCA together. It shows how participants ‘police’ the boundaries between the dreaming and waking world by using newly identified contrast structures that are produced to describe the facticity of dreamt events and to display normative identities when dreamt and waking selves have been breached. By showing how identity is worked up both sequentially and categorially, it illustrates an overriding concern with morality and culture. Furthermore, it shows that culture is not reflected in dreams, rather, it is displayed in and through talk about them. The thesis makes important contributions to the sociology of sleep and dreams; it makes links between addiction, recovery, and identity, which opens potential new lines of enquiry. It also contributes to CA/MCA research on qualitative research interviews by showing how interviewer (IR) and interviewee (IE) identities are negotiated on a moment-by-moment, occasion-by-occasion basis. Overall, it shows being normal is accomplished in these situated contexts.