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Abstract: Based on the material of short prose by I. S. Turgenev (“The Dream”, “The Song of Triumphant Love”, “Klara Milich”) and V. O. Pelevin (“Go to Sleep”, “The Blue Lantern”, “The Contemplator of the Shadow”), the article deals with the problem of transformation of conception and the ways of implementation of dream states. It also analyzes the change in the function of sleep and dreams in classical and post-classical literature. In classical literature, oneiric text is defined as a verbal presentation of a dream of a character or the author in a work of fiction. In mystery short stories and novellas by Turgenev, we are dealing with the verbal recreation of sleep as a borderline state of the character, as an experience of a different kind of existence, and as a way of immersion in the irrational region of the human psyche. Turgenev’s oneiropoetics and science fiction are aimed at discovering the unknown in the human psyche and are associated with the eternal problems of love and death, search for the truth, and the achievement of integrity of the artistic-philosophical world. In the postmodern era, dreams become one of the most common ways of text constructing and serve to convey the idea of total virtualization of reality. The modern author does not set the task to describe dreams; they create a text according to the logic of the dream. Meanwhile, the same eternal questions as in classical literature are subject to artistic reflection in Pelevin’s stories: the truth and lies, the good and the evil, the search for the meaning of life, freedom, and belief in God. The dialogue between the postmodern writer and the classic is based on the idea of inseparability of the sensuous and the supersensuous, the contradictions between which can be removed in an act of artistic study of the secrets of the human psyche. The writer of the epoch-making era speaks with contemporaries about the human consciousness that has fallen into the trap, because there are no practical methods for “lifting the shackles of the mind”, but the chances for transcendence and self-realization in consciousness-created worlds still remain. Pelevin’s dreams often become a manifestation of esoteric consciousness and mystical revelation.