The article considers the textual characteristics of oral stories about dreams and dreaming. We consider the presence of typical patterns of verbal narratives, belonging to both folk and modern spontaneous speech, which is recorded by researchers. The material for the research is more than 200 narratives about dreams and dreaming, collected in St Petersburg during 2004-2005. The typical narrative is considered to be a specific discourse genre with selected poetic features. In focus in the present study is a set of semantic, stylistic and structural characteristics of the texts under consideration. A selected strata of research concerns urban narrative about dreams and dreaming in Dostoevsky's novels.