Talking about your dreams is a bit like describing the inside of your own mouth: intimate, personal but mostly dull. And yet, the urge to tell someone that they had a starring role in your dream is always extremely tempting. At least for me. I seem to become particularly seized by the urge to share my night-time wanderings if I haven’t actually seen the person in the sleeve-touching, 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 extended to him), but it involved something to do with a doorway, milk bottles and me collecting signatures. Somehow, the fact that this person sprang into my unconscious, apparently unbidden and uninvited, easily 10 years since we’d last shared oxygen and dust, felt significant. Was he OK? Did it mean something? Had he summoned me? It turned out, he was living in Nottingham, worked for a charity and hadn’t thought of me for probably a decade.
The stickier scenario is when you have a particularly potent dream about someone you then come across, 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 next to during science) and the deeper psychological meaning of those details (that I missed home; that I felt on the threshold of a new life; that I was somehow “signing up” to something I felt unsure about – who knows). Freud argued that our psyche necessarily obscures or changes some elements of our dream (people become dogs, vaginas become handbags, maybe mums become milk bottles) to protect us from the harsh truths our unconscious mind is grappling with.
But then Jung pronounced that actually, no, dreams were an opportunity to work through greater, even archetypal troubles and we should take note of the details just as they are. Frankly, 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, and hoped nobody would check the citation), 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 an association, then they are nobody’s business but your own. While you might dream about a boy from school, the dream isn’t about him but you. Perhaps he represents youth, or sexual rejection, or academic success or hedonism. So why would you tell him? It would be like shouting into a Reebok that you regret the way you lost your virginity. Or solemnly explaining to a blow-up flamingo that you’re scared of failing at your job.
And yet, I know it can be fun, even enlightening, to tell someone that they were in your dream. It might bring an acquaintance closer, or an old friend back into your life. It can start to patch up a threadbare sibling relationship or bring about a necessary conversation with a sulking partner. If you’re in a position to capitalise on it, telling someone you 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. Careful here, though. Telling someone you fancy (or used to fancy, or have considered 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”. It’s naff; but then what about dating isn’t naff, if you really look at it?
It is tantalising to imagine that those night-time illuminations, those shadows, contain some sort of fundamental truth that your own wet brassica of a mind is desperately trying to communicate to you. If you’re lucky enough to have a therapist, they’ll make the 50 minutes fly by. But when it comes to telling your boss that between the synapses of your brain last night you were pushing their eyes so far into their skull that you accidentally killed them? I think maybe you can keep that one to yourself.
