There's this text in Quirke's Comprehensive Grammar:
The author later states that when the content of the dream is narrated, the past tenses 'was threatening','had' relate not to 'breakfast time', but to an earlier point (namely just before the girl's awakening).
If these actions happened before some other explicit time point, why do they have the past tense without perfective? I'm guessing it's because the past-in-the-past time is being identified by 'In my sister's dream', so there's no real need for the perfective to do it – but I'm not sure if that's the right interpretation.
A similar example from another book:
I rolled to my hands and knees, shook myself all over and then came to my feet. A dream, I told myself. Only a dream. Fear and shame washed over me, dirtying me in their passage. In my dream I had pleaded for mercy as I had not in reality.
What's the difference? Any help? Thanks.
Best Answer
He is describing the dream itself as it was unfolding, not in relation to an event that occurred before or after it. You are showing a fundamental misunderstanding of tenses when you claim that the dream occurred before some other event, for ALL events are preceded by other events and followed by yet other events. Objective reality is irrelevant to the choice of tense. It is the speaker's subjective presentation of the event, the speaker's "framing" of the event, that is relevant.
Is the speaker describing the event as it unfolds? Describing the event as something that happened before or after another event? As something that merely took place?
Here the speaker is describing a past series of dream-events as the dream unfolded to his sister:
If he wanted to describe his sister's dream in terms of one that he himself had dreamed, let's say a week afterwards, then he might well use the past perfect: