The following is an outline of ways to think psychologically about character, dreams, and dreaming in film and fiction. These reflections refer to the ways of thinking about dreams and about characters we remember, create, study, or interview.
Dreams tell a different nighttime story, using an often unfamiliar grammar and vocabulary of images.
We think about our lives during the day, and at night we go on thinking, but we think in a different language, the language of action, emotion, images, stories, scenes, clips from a larger story. Freud thought of dreams as disguised wishes while Jung thought of dreams as symbolic attempts at self-healing and transformation. Jung wrote that dreams compensated the limitations of conscious life. Some dreams are immediately clear and useful, others require reflection, interpretation, and help, while some elude all attempts at understanding. Dreams almost always seem to be about the dreamer, even if the dreamer is not in the dream.