Superman fans, please do not take offense. I have never read a single Superman comic, and my knowledge of him is pretty much the stuff that everybody knows. My subconscious mind, though, seems to want to analyze his psyche, as evidenced in my dream last night. And it did a pretty bizarre job.
So, I had this dream where there was a character named "Screamer" in the Superman comic. She was supposed to be Superman's girlfriend (in the dream Lois Lane didn't seem to exist) and she was a superhero whose power was her ability to scream-- but I got the impression that her screaming didn't actually do anything to the bad guys, it just boosted Superman's power so that he could kick their butts.
And no one ever saw Screamer. Superman talked about her a lot, but he was apparently the only person who ever interacted with her. When he needed her help, he would go someplace where no one could see him, and then people would hear a scream, and he'd come back and say that Screamer had done her job.
In the dream, it seemed that there was a common idea among Superman fans that Screamer wasn't a separate person of her own, she was in Superman's head. The idea was that Superman did the screaming himself, and just told everybody it came from his unseen girlfriend. But it wasn't like she was an imaginary friend, and it wasn't like she was an alien consciousness trapped inside his head with him... it wasn't even a split personality thing, either. It was that Superman was in love with a part of his own mind... apparently the part of him that liked to scream, I guess.
And since the rest of the world would find that very odd, Superman personified this part of his mind as a girlfriend that nobody saw.
I do NOT know where this dream came from... except that I'm writing a short story in which a young lady experiences a sort of identity crisis, wondering who or what she truly is... and the Superman character is mentioned a couple of times in passing. And it's also the time of the month when my brain produces the craziest dreams.
Maybe I should name that part of my mind "Dreamer." And, like, lock him up somewhere.
