Sleep secrets: should you ever tell someone you dreamt about them?

It can be difficult to resist the urge to divulge that someone has been rattling around your unconscious. But it is worth proceeding with care

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.