Painajakogemusest rääkimine internetifoorumites
Sharing Nightmare Experience on Internet Forums

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on sharing nightmare experience on Internet forums. The author discusses how people, who, as a rule, are not active carriers of a consistent nightmare lore, speak about this phenomenon, how and on the basis of which sources they define and interpret their experience, and which dynamics become manifest in solving ideological arguments. One of the objectives of the article is to find out if we could, in spite of the fact that nightmare forum users are rather random and with very different backgrounds, regard them as a lore community, who, in their interaction, verbalise and interpret an individual’s experience as consistent with the existing tradition. Also, the material obtained from the forums is compared with older nightmare texts, in order to highlight the features inherent in present-day material. It could be noted that even if many motifs known from older Estonian lore were repetitive in forum conversations, the specificity of forum conversations created a novel group dynamics (for instance, certain patterns in opposing other users). Unlike older texts, forum discussions present also parallel discourses of modern science and medicine; however, the main emphasis still lies on magical and supernatural nightmare experience.

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