Hearing Voices in Dreams: Freud's Tossing and Turning with Speech and Writing

Abstract

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud repeatedly claims that there is no original speech in dreams. All dreamed speech is lifted from waking life and used as mutable raw material, whereas thought and writing can occur independently of the dream-work. This article examines Freud's insistence of the unoriginality and mutability of speech, which ostensibly reverses the supposed phonocentric tradition of Western metaphysics. Freud's interpretations, the article suggests, point to the importance of a general linguistic system in the production of meaning in dreams. This system includes non-phonetic writing and the concretization of abstract dream-thoughts into visual images. This concretization or materialization also applies to phonetic writing, which allows for a number of articulations. Utilizing literary phonemic reading theorized by Garrett Stewart, the article proposes a new interpretation of "Philippe's dream." The speech/writing dichotomy does not fully hold in Freud's argumentative rhetoric, nor is it unequivocally functional in interpreting dreams -- or literature.