Ttalking about your dreams is a bit like describing the inside of your own mouth: intimate, personal but mostly bland. And yet, the urge to tell someone they starred in your dream is always extremely tempting. At least for me. I seem to be especially gripped by the desire to share my nocturnal wanderings when I haven’t actually seen the person in the sleeve-touched, hair-smelling flesh for a while.
I once spent two hours tracking down an email address for someone I went to middle school with (and hadn’t seen since we were both about 13), just to tell him he was in my dream I won’t bore you with the details (not a consideration I gave him), but it involved something to do with a doorway, milk bottles, and me collecting autographs. Somehow the fact that this person had jumped into my unconscious, seemingly unbidden and uninvited, easily 10 years since we had last shared oxygen and dust, felt significant. Was he right? Did it mean something? Did he summon me? It turned out he lived in Nottingham, worked for a charity and hadn’t thought of me for probably a decade.
The tougher scenario is when you have a particularly powerful dream about someone you then run into, out here, among the car fumes and empty juice cartons of the real world. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud distinguished between the manifest and latent content of a dream; that there are the details you remember (ie milk bottles, a door frame, a boy you once sat with during science) and the deeper psychological meaning of those details (that I missed home; that I was on the doorstep felt of a new life; that I was somehow “signing up” for something I felt uncertain about – who knows). Freud argued that our psyche necessarily disguises or changes certain elements of our dream (people become dogs, vaginas become handbags, perhaps mothers become milk bottles) to protect us from the harsh truths our subconscious struggles with.
But then Jung expressed that actually, no, dreams are an opportunity to work through larger, even archetypal problems and we need to note the details just as they are. In fact, I’m pretty sure I only really managed to pass my psychology A-level by making up a study during the exam (I used my then-boyfriend’s surname and date of birth, hoping no one would not checking the quote), so I’m in no position to start proposing my own theories. And yet, well, here I go.
If the people, objects and places in dreams are not simply people, objects or places, but rather representations of a feeling, and a way of conjuring up an association, then it is nobody’s business but your own. While you may dream about a boy from school, the dream is not about him, but about you. Perhaps he represents youth, or sexual rejection, or academic success or hedonism. So why would you tell him? It would be like screaming into a Reebok that you regret the way you lost your virginity. Or to solemnly explain to an inflatable flamingo that you are afraid of failing your job.
And yet I know it can be fun, even enlightening, to tell someone they were in your dream. It might bring an acquaintance closer, or an old friend back into your life. It can start patching up a frayed sibling relationship or a necessary conversation with a nagging partner. If you’re in a position to capitalize on it, telling someone you’ve had a romantic or erotic dream about them might be just the push you both needed to address the enormous condom-shaped elephant in the room. to speak Be careful here though. Telling someone you fancy (or used to fancy, or was considering fancying) that they were in your dream last night is a bit “I have to go to this thing for work and there will be free drinks be”. It’s naff; but then what about dating isn’t naff, when you really look at it?
It’s tempting to imagine that those night lights, those shadows, hold some kind of fundamental truth that your own wet brassica of a mind is desperately trying to communicate to you. If you are lucky enough to have a therapist, they will make the 50 minutes fly by. But when it comes to telling your boss that last night between the synapses of your brain you pushed their eyes so far into their skull that you accidentally killed them? I think maybe you can keep that one to yourself.
