Character Clues
Character Analysis
Freud doesn't spend a lot of time discussing how clothes make the man, or asking if a rose by any other name would smell as sweet—not in relation to family, friends, and colleagues in his waking life, that is. But when it comes to interpreting the tools of characterization that are used in dreams, Freud is all over the topic like white on rice.
Names
What's in a name? According to Sigmund Freud, quite a lot—when it comes to interpreting dream-condensation, that is.
Throughout The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argues again and again that dreams like to pack a ton of associations and connections into tidy little bundles. Unpacking them usually means paying strict attention to the way that language links things together.
For example, in his interpretation of his Non Vixit Dream, Freud realizes that the dream brought multiple associations together through the name "Josef." Included in the dream are memories associated with Freud's senior colleague Josef Breuer, the Kaiser Josef Memorial in Vienna, Freud's junior colleague Josef Paneth, and a street named for Kaiser Josef (6.7.53-54).
Although Freud doesn't believe that names help to characterize people in our waking lives, he argues that they certainly do in our dream-lives. Through the interconnections and associations that dreams can make by playing with names, all kinds of unconscious thoughts and wishes can be revealed.
Physical Appearances
When it comes to noticing a person's clothes, gestures, and body language, Freud has a keen eye that would make even Hawkeye jealous. Freud's flair for detail is particularly useful for his dream-interpretations, because according to his theory, dreams have a habit of melding multiple people together into one.
For example, take Freud's Dream of Irma's Injection (2.1.16). In it, his patient "Irma" stands beside a window in such a way that Freud immediately thinks of another young woman—a friend of Irma's and a woman Freud would have liked to take on as a patient. Irma also looks pale and puffy and has bad teeth—features that make Freud think of his wife (2.1.23).
By noticing that Dream-Irma's physical appearance is very different from that of Irma in real life, Freud is able to untangle the associations that the dream has made between Irma, Irma's friend, and his own wife.
Speech and Dialogue
Freud says in The Interpretation of Dreams that the speeches and dialogue that appear in our dreams are pieced together from remembered materials. He explains:
Where spoken sentences occur in dreams and are expressly distinguished as such from thoughts, it is an invariable rule that the words spoken in the dream are derived from spoken words remembered in the dream-material. The text in the dream is either retained unaltered or expressed with some slight displacement. A speech in a dream is often put together from various recollected speeches, the text remaining the same but being given, if possible several meanings, or one different from the original one. (6.2.62)
Freud goes on to conclude that "[a] spoken remark in a dream is not infrequently no more than an allusion to an occasion on which the remark in question was made" (6.2.62). So a spoken remark in a dream can be very revealing.
Imagine, for instance, that you dream that your very best friend says a number of unexpected and strangely critical things to you. When you wake up, you realize that your dream-friend spoke words that one of your high-school teachers once said to you after blew off a major assignment. What would Freud have to say about this strange conflation of your BFF and your high-school teacher?
He would say, of course, that there is an unconscious reason why your bestie and your teacher have been mixed together in the dream. Your dream-friend's spoken words may be totally out of character, but because they originally come from someone else, that peculiar combination says a lot.