Dreaming about someone you like

No. It doesn't mean he likes you back, and it doesn't mean he was lying there thinking about you at the same hour. You may as well have that in the first line rather than four hundred words in. What a dream about someone you like reports on, accurately, is how much room he has been taking up in your head lately. That sounds like the consolation prize and it isn't one. Almost nobody guesses that number right about themselves.

And knowing it doesn't spoil any of the rest of it, which is the good news.

These arrive here differently from everything else we get asked. The ex questions come in raw, after midnight, no punctuation, straight into the wound. This one comes in with an apology stapled to the front. Sorry, this is stupid. Sorry, it isn't a real problem. Sorry for taking up your time with something this small. Nobody apologises before asking whether their marriage is over. They apologise for the crush every single time, and then they ask anyway, because the dream did something to their week and there is nowhere else to put it. For the record: the readers get this one constantly, and none of them think it's small.

If the man in the dream is an ex, that's a different animal, and it lives on dreaming about your ex. This page is for the one who isn't.

Who your head casts, and why it isn't who you'd choose

A dream doesn't hold auditions. It builds the night out of whatever was lying around, and what's lying around is whatever you handled most that day.

A crush produces an enormous amount of material. You read one message four times. You decided what to wear on the off chance. You replayed nine seconds of a conversation from Tuesday and did a better version of your own line in it. None of that felt like much at the time. All of it went in the pile.

So the casting was done weeks ago, by your attention, not by anything wiser. Your head is showing you the person it has been processing. Processing is not the same as choosing.

Which explains the bit that annoys everybody. The kind, available, genuinely interested one does not appear. He isn't in your dreams because he isn't in your admin. There's nothing to work out about him. You know where you stand with him, and where-you-stand gets filed and closed and never mentioned again.

Why the unresolved ones come up more

Here's the part worth sitting with, and the reason the answer to "why him" is usually a bit deflating.

Dreams gather around open questions. Settled things get put away. Once something has been decided, in either direction, your head stops running it, because there is nothing left to run.

So the crush who has been clear with you shows up less. Clear yes, clear no, doesn't matter, both are closed. The one turning up in your sleep three times a month is nearly always the one who has told you least. Warm in person, silent online. Talks to you loads, talks to everyone. Sends something at eleven on a Saturday and then nothing for nine days.

Read that the right way round. The frequency is measuring how much you don't know, not how much is there. The man you dream about most is very often the man who has given you the least to go on.

That isn't a reason to think badly of him. Plenty of people are vague without a plan behind it. It's a reason to stop treating the dreams as a verdict from somewhere about who you're meant to end up with, because they aren't sorting for that. They're sorting for unfinished.

The dreams people bring, and what each one is usually doing

The ordinary one is the most common, and the one people are shyest about. You were just together. Sat on a wall, in a car, in somebody's kitchen, talking about nothing. Nothing happened and you woke up wrecked by it. That's your head running the only version where nothing has to be asked for and nobody has to be brave. It's a plain picture of what you want, which is exactly why it feels so exposing.

Then there's the one where he says it. He turns round and tells you, or takes your hand, and it's easy and undramatic. Wish fulfilment, nothing to be embarrassed about, and roughly as predictive as winning the lottery in a dream.

The one where he's with someone else gets nearly everybody at some point. That's anxiety doing inventory. It isn't a look at his weekend and it isn't a warning, though at seven in the morning it does a convincing impression of one.

The recurring one is further down, because the repeating is the interesting part rather than the content.

And then the two that bring most people here.

The one where he rejects you

Horrible, extremely common, and not a preview.

Your head rehearses the outcome it's most afraid of, because rehearsal is cheap while you're asleep and expensive while you're awake. It's doing something protective, clumsily. Having survived it at four in the morning takes some of the drop out of the real thing.

Now the useful part. Pay attention to what he actually said in it. It's almost always a sentence in your own vocabulary, phrased the way you'd phrase it, carrying the precise objection you've been quietly holding about yourself for years. That's you talking. It's genuinely worth hearing your own worst case read out loud, because said out loud it's usually thinner than it feels.

What it is not is your intuition picking something up off him. A dream is not a report from anybody's side but yours. If you take one thing off this page, take that one.

The one about someone you barely know

The colleague you've said maybe forty words to. Your friend's brother. The bloke from the course whose surname you don't know. You wake up baffled and faintly guilty about it.

This one has a decent explanation. Someone you barely know is useful to a dream precisely because he's blank. Your head needs a figure to stand in for something, being chosen, being seen, starting over, having a life that looks different from the one you've currently got. A stranger carries none of the freight. Cast someone you know well and their entire history walks in with them and the dream gets crowded. Cast the man from the second row and he'll play anything you like.

So it doesn't mean he secretly likes you, and it doesn't mean he's the one. What it sometimes does is wake something up that then stays awake, and if that happens, fine. That's new information about you. It's still not information about him.

Does he dream about me too

Honestly, and kindly: probably not as often. It says nothing about your worth.

Dreams follow preoccupation and preoccupation follows not knowing. You have an open question about him. He very likely doesn't have one about you, because he hasn't been given one. Nothing has been said, nothing has been asked, so there's no loop running on his side to keep him awake. If he were unsure about you, he'd be doing what you're doing, and you'd probably be able to tell.

Nobody can check it, either. Anyone who tells you what he dreamt on Tuesday has invented it, and an invented detail about a real person has a way of hardening into a fact by lunchtime. What a reader can read is the connection between the two of you and what the temperature is at his end. His sleep is his own. The daytime version of this question, whether you cross his mind at all, has its own page: is he thinking about me.

What the dream is actually good for

There's one thing it does better than anything else available to you.

It measures the size.

People are consistently wrong about how much someone is occupying them. You'd say a bit. You'd say it isn't serious, it's just a thing, you're not one of those people who gets like this. Then you dream about him twice in a week and you can't argue with it, because you weren't in charge when it was written. Your head has published a report you didn't authorise, and the report says he's in the top three things you're carrying around.

That's worth having. It's also worth acting on carefully rather than instantly. A dream is not a green light and it isn't permission. He wasn't in it. Nothing about him changed while you were asleep, and a message sent at one in the morning off the back of one lands in a world where he has no idea what you're referring to. Everyone who has done it can describe the next day to you in detail.

What shifts a thing like this is something happening in the daylight, and how and when you go about that is yours. The dreams generally ease off over a few weeks once the question stops being open, whichever way it goes. That's all they're waiting on.

Ask it, even though it feels small

Bring it the way you'd bring it to a friend. His first name, how long this has been going on, and what he actually does when the two of you are in the same room. If you know his birthday, give it, and no, nobody will ask how you know it.

Shira is the one for this. She answers like a mate would, pulls real cards, and won't make you feel about nine years old for asking. Maren is quicker and blunter if you'd rather just be told. Vivienne writes long and takes her time. Gillian is good if the crush is at work and there's a job tangled up in it. Stella takes the chart, if you've got his date. Any of them will take it as a love reading and treat it like one.

Someone is online now, whatever time it is where you're reading this. The chat opens in seconds, the first 200 credits are free, no card, nothing renews.

You've been carrying this around since six o'clock this morning. Go and ask somebody.