Dreaming After 24 February 2022: Toward a Transmedial Study of War Dreams in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature

This paper proposes a research agenda on dreams in Ukrainian literature written after 24 February 2022. Across war writing, dream episodes condense fear, loss, anticipation, guilt, and survival knowledge into a mode that is neither purely factual testimony nor pure invention. A systematic study of such dream scenes is timely and comparable, in rationale, to landmark work that treated dreams under wartime regimes as culturally and politically meaningful documents (e.g., Beradt, 1966/2025). The proposed project treats dream representation as a literary and semiotic mechanism for “working through” extreme events, while also acknowledging that not all texts seek catharsis: some stage nightmares that remain unresolved, repetitive, or ethically disturbing, foregrounding the return of traumatic experience (Caruth, 1996).
Research questions: (1) How do Ukrainian texts after 24 February 2022 represent dreams of characters (and dream-like states of narrators) in terms of narrative framing, imagery, temporality, and voice? (2) What recurrent functions do these dream passages perform in war narratives (e.g., rehearsal of danger; displaced mourning; moral witnessing; dehumanization and its critique; “future-making” and hope; intrusive repetition)? (3) How do dream scenes travel across media and modes – print fiction, poetry, documentary prose, diaries/essays, stage readings, audio/video performances, and social-media circulation – and what semiotic resources (visual layout, typography, quoted messages, sound cues, paratexts) shape their meaning?
Approach and method: The study combines multimodal narratology and social-semiotic multimodality with qualitative discourse analysis. It starts from a curated corpus of Ukrainian war writing (2022–) across genres (novels/short prose, poetry, documentary prose/diaries, public readings), identified through literary awards lists, major publishers, and periodicals. Dream passages are extracted and analyzed using a transparent framework with three layers: (a) form (frame markers, point of view, tense, transitions, modality and evidentiality, reported speech); (b) sensory ensemble (visual, aural, tactile, spatial, bodily cues; absence/presence of named places and persons); (c) function (threat rehearsal, mourning, prophecy/anticipation, memory return, guilt/shame, resistance, satire, dehumanization/rehumanization). A comparative module aligns emergent patterns with established wartime dream corpora and trauma-oriented literary theory, without reducing literary dreams to clinical symptoms.
Expected results and contribution: The project aims to deliver (1) a typology of post-2022 Ukrainian war dreams as a recurring narrative device; (2) an account of how dream scenes become transmedial units that circulate between page, performance, and digital platforms; and (3) an open, extensible methodological template that other researchers can adopt, expand, and replicate.