People from the past in dreams

Dreams often bring people to mind whom I haven’t consciously thought of in weeks, or months, or sometimes years. Some of these dreams ignite a mild sort of curiosity, a writer’s desire to know how the person’s life unfolded. Other dreams leave a deeper, more poignant residual feeling, especially if I’ve dreamed of someone I used to be close to, such as a dear friend or an old boyfriend. It’s not that I’m unsatisfied with my life; I married the right person and am fortunate in my friends, but there are days when the nostalgia for someone I used to know shrouds my heart and makes the whole day melancholy. The last time this happened, very recently, I spent the day trying to understand why the dream had affected me so.
 
I recently heard that the word nostalgia comes from the Greek words for home and ache. That made me think of the ways these people who linger in my heart and memory represent home. People we love truly see us, and in a profound way offer a place for our hearts to feel at home. Of course, each relationship is different, so different loved ones will see parts of us that others might not recognize. The nostalgia I feel for a girl I went to school with, who died too young, is rooted in the fact that we could laugh and laugh when we were alone together, though we didn’t run in the same circles by high school. That’s different from the nostalgia I feel for a young man I dated, who made me feel beautiful and desirable and spent hours in intense conversation with me.
 
I understand from a theoretical point of view that people from my past show up in dreams because they carry projections I’ve put on them. So when it’s someone I barely knew, the projection is pretty “clean,” in that I made assumptions about who they were and chose to see those parts of my psyche in them, rather than in myself. Those dreams rarely leave me shaken. When people I knew well show up, the dream images of those people carry much more complicated projections—things I know about them become tangled up with the way I feel about them, and it’s harder for me to sort out the meaning of the dream. Even the distance of decades doesn’t always help. In some areas of life, our experience isn’t linear, and when a dream reminds me of an old friend, I feel that kinship as keenly as I did when we spent time together. The presence of one of these lost loved ones makes me remember all the parts of our relationship, the good and bad, the ecstatic and painful. The dream doesn’t often provide any obvious clue about which part of the relationship it’s referencing.
 
Sometimes I wonder if we’ve actually met in some dream space. I want to track them down and ask if they’ve dreamed also of me. The internet makes it easier to find these people, and sometimes to learn a lot about where their lives took them. In some cases, getting back in touch is comfortable and easy, in others, the connections ran so deep that other people in their lives might feel threatened, and I stay away. But I’d still give a lot to have the chance to sit and talk with them again, to hear their stories and discover how time has changed them, and to let them see how time has changed me. I long to be so connected again that it feels like home.