If You Dream About Someone, Are They Thinking About You?

An old friend turns up in a dream. You haven't spoken in a year, but there they were, sitting across a kitchen table that doesn't exist, talking like no time had passed. You wake up with a strange thought: maybe they were thinking about me.

It's one of the most widespread beliefs about dreams, and one of the oldest. The short answer is no. Dreams are built entirely inside your own head, and nothing about the other person travels into them. But the longer answer turns the question around in a way that's worth sitting with: the dream says something real about you, and about who you miss.

A very old idea

The romantic version of this belief has deep roots. In Japan's Heian court, more than a thousand years ago, dreams were a place lovers could meet, and poets wrote about them constantly. The most famous example is by Ono no Komachi, in the Kokinshū anthology. In Donald Keene's translation:

Thinking about him
I slept, only to have him
Appear before me—
Had I known it was a dream,
I should never have wakened.

Scholar S. Yumiko Hulvey at the University of Florida translates the opening as a question, "Did you come to me because I dropped off to sleep tormented by love?" and notes that women poets of the era used dreams as the one place an unfulfilled desire could be met.

Look closely and Komachi is already hedging. Did he come to her? Or did she dream of him because she fell asleep thinking about him? A thousand years later, that second reading is roughly where the science landed.

Why the belief sticks

People don't treat all dreams equally. In a set of studies published in 2009 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Carey Morewedge and Michael Norton found that most people they surveyed believed dreams reveal hidden truths: 74% of students in India, 65% in South Korea and 56% in the United States picked that view over the alternatives.

The more revealing part is which dreams people believe. When participants recalled a real dream about someone they knew, dreams about people they liked felt more meaningful. Pleasant dreams about liked people counted more than unpleasant ones, and for disliked people it flipped. In another study, people rated an imagined dream where a friend defended them as more meaningful than one where the same friend kissed their partner, and the good dream made them feel closer to that friend.

The authors put it plainly: dreams that clash with what we already believe and want "are less likely to be endorsed." So a dream that says my old friend misses me is exactly the kind people take seriously. It's flattering, and it's what we were hoping for anyway. A dream where that same friend ignores you at a party gets shrugged off as just a weird dream.

Who actually shows up in your dreams

If the other person isn't sending the dream, where does it come from? Mostly from your memory of the people in your life, sorted by how much they matter to you.

A 2000 study by Kahn, Stickgold, Pace-Schott and Hobson went through 320 dream reports and found 48% of characters were named people the dreamer knew. Another 35% were generic types like "a friend" or "a teacher," and only 16% were completely unfamiliar. Dreams are mostly cast from people you already know.

A 2025 study in Scientific Reports by Balch, Raider, Reed and McNamara tracked 124 people over two weeks and found that how often you see someone, how close you feel and how much conflict there is all predicted who turned up in dreams. Usually, seeing someone more made them more likely to appear. But for important family members like parents and siblings, the effect reversed. The less people saw them, the more they dreamed about them. The researchers suggest dreams "may play a compensatory role in maintaining relationships with close others when they are not present."

That's about as close as science gets to an answer for the original question. You dream about someone because you miss them, not because they miss you.

Dreams are social by design

Some researchers think this isn't an accident. The social simulation theory, developed by Antti Revonsuo and colleagues in Finland, proposes that dreaming is a kind of rehearsal space for relationships. A 2019 test of the idea by Jarno Tuominen and colleagues found dreams contained more social events than people's waking life did over the same period.

One of their predictions didn't pan out, though. They expected dreams to strengthen bonds by making interactions with close people especially positive, and that's not what they found. Your brain may keep the people who matter in rotation, but it doesn't promise you a nice time with them.

The dream that makes you reach out

The belief may be wrong, but it still moves people. In a 2022 survey of 2,929 people, Michael Schredl and Anja Göritz found that 37% had contacted someone because they'd dreamed about them, and about 6% did it once a month or more. It was more common among people who remember lots of dreams and take them seriously.

Which means the old folk belief sometimes comes true in reverse. They weren't thinking about you. But after the dream you're thinking about them, you send a message, and now they're thinking about you.

What to do with it

If someone keeps showing up in your dreams, the useful question isn't what they're feeling. It's what you are. Do you miss them? Is there something unresolved? Did something today, a song or a smell or a street, bring them to mind?

A dream journal is good at catching this. One dream about an old friend is noise. The same friend five times in a month, always around the same kind of week, is a pattern worth noticing. And if the person is someone you share a life with, it might connect to why couples sometimes swear they've shared a dream.

And if you miss them, you already know what the research says a lot of people do next.