Mama dreams of moving her family out of the ghetto and into a house with a yard where children can play and she can tend a garden. Her dream has been deferred since she and her husband moved into the apartment that the Youngers still inhabit. Every day, her dream provides her with an incentive to make money. But no matter how much she and her husband strived, they could not scrape together enough money to make their dream a reality. His death and the resulting insurance money present Mama’s first opportunity to realize her dream.

Ruth’s dream is similar to Mama’s. She wants to build a happy family and believes one step toward this goal is to own a bigger and better place to live. Ruth’s dream is also deferred by a lack of money, which forces her and Walter to live in a crowded apartment where their son, Travis, must sleep on a sofa.

Beneatha’s dream is to become a doctor and to save her race from ignorance. The first part of her dream may be deferred because of the money Walter loses. Her dream is also one deferred for all women. Beneatha lives in a time when society expects women to build homes rather than careers. As for saving her race from ignorance, Beneatha believes she can make people understand through action, but the exact course she chooses remains unclear at the end of the play.

Walter dreams of becoming wealthy and providing for his family as the rich people he drives around do. He often frames this dream in terms of his family—he wants to give them what he has never had. He feels like a slave to his family’s economic hardship. His dream has been deferred by his poverty and inability to find decent employment. He attributes his lack of job prospects to racism, a claim that may be partially true but that is also a crutch. Over the course of the play, his understanding of his dream of gaining material wealth evolves, and by play’s end, it is no longer his top priority.