Dreaming about friend

• Availability over significance, the organising fact.
• Behaviour that does not fit the person.
• Fixed ages and fixed settings, for older friendships.
• A group that cannot be enumerated.

Ordinary friendly dreams are common, pleasant and under-recorded, and recording them changes what a journal shows.

Dreams of friends who have died sit with the bereavement material and are usually comforting.

A friend behaving badly produces waking awkwardness of the same kind the kissing entry describes, and it is equally unearned.

Dreamers sometimes report reading significance into who does and does not appear, which is the error this entry exists to correct.

Dream character frequency tracking waking encounter frequency is a robust content-analysis finding, and it is the single most useful corrective to how people read their own dream casts.

Out-of-character behaviour follows from how dream characters work: they are generated to serve the dream rather than simulated from the person, so consistency is not guaranteed and is not meaningful when it fails.

The uncountable group is a good illustration of dream detail being generated only where attention goes.

Friendship carries different formal weight in different societies, and dreams about friends have attracted much less interpretive attention historically than dreams about family.

That gap is itself interesting and probably says more about who wrote the traditions than about dreams.

Well established: dream character frequency follows waking encounter frequency rather than emotional importance.

Reasonably supported: dream characters are generated for the scene rather than simulated consistently.

Not established: any significance in who appears.

• Who appeared, and how often do you see them?
• Were they behaving like themselves?
• Could you say who was in the group?
• What age were they?

Log the cast against how often you actually see each person. Most dreamers find the correlation holds and stop reading significance into the guest list.