The dream pun: What is a play on words without words?

This paper reviews punning in dreams as described in a popular 1974 book by Ann Faraday, The Dream Game, The reasons for undertaking this analysis are threefold. The first reason is to show that dream puns are all based on either homonymy or polysemy and seem to have the purpose of representing abstract thought in concrete form. The second reason is to point out that dream puns are dependent upon a specifically linguistic relationship, a mapping between the concrete and abstract senses of some linguistic data; a direct word-image relation is impossible. The third reason is to suggest that our linguistic minds create dream puns while we sleep, continuing the mind chatter of the previous day.