Characters and dialogue in dreams

[Croatguy]

How is the dreaming brain able to develop characters and dialogue in dreams? I find it fascinating how some dreams are followed like a script. I can understand how dialogue from yourself is created, as you are just playing yourself in a dream and so the dialogue would be natural.  But for the unconscious mind to create other characters who speak is amazing. 

[Chris87]

Hello Croatguy,
I am currently studying the works of Dr Carl Gustav Jung, a psychologist whose work brought to light the world of complexes in the unconcious as well as many books about Dream Psychology. He speaks of our unconcious in two broad catagories, the personal unconcious and the collective unconcious. The personal unconcious is made up of things that are perceived by your conciousness, that is, things that you experience. The Collective unconcious is made up of imprinted material, symbols like the dagger and bowl, and the hero archeatype and the dragon archeatype. These "archeatypes" are symbols and stories handed down from generations of humans. All men have these imprints and they can be found in everyones dreams. These imprinted archeatypes can show up in dreams as the language of dreams, since the unconcious mind doesn't speak the same language as your concious mind. The script that you speak of is, as i hypothosize, is your unconcious speaking to your concious mind....a means of communication. This communication makes it seem like there is someone else writing the script instead of yourself! I hope this helps and if there is a professional out there that would like to correct me I would welcome their input to learn from.
Thank you!

[Croatguy]

Interesting theory, Chris. It may well be the unconscious mind communicating. But how is the unconscious mind able to take on the persona of the character in your dream? For example, if I am dreaming of my mother, my mother will talk and act like my mother in real life. Its not like my id is taking on the persona of my mother, it actually feels like it is my mother. 

[Nivleonus]

Hey there,
I feel that I should mention that characters in a dream are actually generally 'sections' of a persons personallity. They communicate different things. Considering the reason your mother acts and talks like your mother is based around years of observation. Your unconcious mind picks up the mannerisms that make up your mother and applies them to your dreamworld. What a more important question would be is what the conversation represents in the dream, what the role of your mother represents.

NL

[DrmDoc]

If I may join your discussion, understanding how our unconscious manifest experiences we recall as dreams is something I've studied for more than thirty years.  What I've learned is that dreaming is a state of consciousness altered by our brain's partial isolation from physical/material sensory experience during the sleep process.  Essentially, the cognitive centers of our brain awakes during sleep in response to metabolic activity in the part of our central nervous system we call the brainstem.  When our brain awakes during sleep, it attempts to interpret what has caused its arousal. 

In a sense, our dreams are interpretations of what has disturbed our restful state.  The dialogue of dreams, from verbal to imagery, is an attempt to understand what may be disturbing our peace of mind.  Although the content of our dreams often seem nonsensical, it is meaningful because it follows the non-linear and non-literal logic of mental experience and reality.  Dreams occur during our partial isolation from physical/material experience; therefore, our dreams and, by extension, their meaning encompass something entirely mental in nature and affect.  Simply stated, you could view your dreams as an effort to understand some lingering influence upon your mind and emotion.