One of the things that characterizes the "unconscious" is that it contains material that is not yet "speech-ripe" or "word-ready."  Ideas, intuitions, sensory impressions, emotional responses, inspirations, and commentary may not be ready to be formed into coherent speech and are more easily given shape in archetypal symbolic images and emotionally charged experiences than they are in conscious, discursive, "word-ripe" thought. This process of unconscious striving to become more conscious is ubiquitous and universal, and is taking place all the time, day and night, asleep or awake. 

The dreams we remember from sleep are "snap-shots" of this process. Every dream is at one level a request from the unconscious for the waking mind, (that part of me that will end up remembering the experience), to exert sufficient conscious effort to find clear words and images for the material that is straining to be recognized more consciously.

The remembered dream is a tissue of protection; it takes the form of apparently external experience while at the same time symbolically reflecting the multiple layers and internal realities of the dreamer's own psyche. In that sense, the dream is exactly like the projections through which we all experience waking life - where it is always easier to see these "almost conscious" parts of ourselves so much more clearly in what we mistake to be conscious, "objective" observations of others, and fail, (at least in that initial moment), to recognize as arising spontaneously out of our own unconscious depths.

The process of unconscious projection itself is the last stop on the "railroad" that regularly and constantly brings previously totally unconscious material "up" into the full embrace of waking self-awareness.

It is also often the case that in the midst of a dream there will be unexpected moments where clear verbal responses from other dream figures suddenly cease. Often these figures have previously been helpful and now suddenly become stubbornly silent - even in the face of the dreamer's increasing efforts to get them to respond and speak. Most often, these moments become occasions for the dreamer-in-the-dream, (as well as the awakened dreamer-remembering-the-dream), to feel heightened frustration, increasing irritation, and often deepening confusion.

For example, perhaps your mother has appeared in several dreams and has always had helpful (or sometimes unhelpful) things to say, and in this dream she is suddenly mute... Or your spouse has appeared in the dream and does not answer you when you ask him/her a question, or ask for help of some kind. This "frozen," "unhelpful" behavior often becomes an occasion for increasingly negative emotional response on the part of the dreamer.

Or perhaps the dream moments may involve sales people, or students, or friends and neighbors, or co-workers, etc., who are supposed to treat me and respond to my instructions and questions in a particular way - and certainly NOT with their apparent obstruction and silence.

All these figures are very likely to be unconscious symbolic expressions and indications that at that moment in the dream I am in direct contact with ideas, and habits of behavior that are no longer as unquestionably right as I used to believe - and which maybe I still believe are "absolutely correct" in waking life.  

There is no more reason to take the seemingly unquestionable" emotional narrative of the dream experience exclusively literally, than there is to take any other element of the dream experience in an exclusively literal fashion. In my experience, the frustrating silences are very likely to be place holders for any number of other feelings, emotions, thoughts, and intuitions that turn out to be of tremendous interest and practical use when they develop and can be understood more clearly and consciously.

Far more often than not these frustrating interactions in our dream indicate that the dream is moving me toward territory associated with new levels of potential conscious self-awareness. Such moments are invitations from the dream to evolve, to let go of any unquestioned assumptions "dream-ego-me" has been carrying, and to respond out of surprise and curiosity, rather than frustration and irritation.

If dream-ego-me can respond with some kind of lucid awareness and curiosity to these unexpected frustrations, then I may be able to recognize these moments as symbolic statements in my dream that I am encountering new ideas, that my conventional expectations may not be the "whole story," as I have always believed them to be,

All dreams, and all parts of dreams, (no matter how upsetting or distressing they may seem to be on first encounter), come in the service of health and wholeness, and speak a universal language of metaphor and symbol. An unexpected silence, or frustration in a dream is one of those universal moments that often mark the encounter with the actual process of psycho-spiritual growth and change. Such moments are usually an invitation to see my own life with new eyes, and to understand that I may have reached the edge of what I already know, and am being invited to "hold my tongue" until the words that are capable of expressing my new understandings and possibilities are ready to be spoken and heard.