If the word is randomly chosen from the dictionary, then there isn't any general method that would get the solution faster than trying them all in order.
For your particular dream - you might be able to make it easier if the lock isn't clever about words that have other words in them, e.g. if the password was "form" and you said "forming" would it unlock? If so you could go for the words that include other words in them to cut out more possibilities per-guess.
Perl and a pronunciation dictionary might be able to help in this case :-)