Social Dreams

Personally social activity in my dreams is a very rare occurrence. I guess we're all different?!

Yeah, that does seem to make sense. I feel like I keep recommending Why We Sleep by Matt Walker lately, but there is a lot of relevant info in the book for anyone with an interest in sleep and dreams. Sleep is so crucial for learning that I've made it a habit to position my personal reading and studies of topics of interest until right before bed. There were actually studies mentioned in Why We sleep about how people who have lost sleep are actually worse at interpreting facial expressions accurately the next day, so it does seem very plausible that sleep/dreams are serving important functions for our social abilities.

Interesting. I think I phrased that trickily. I'd say about 1% or less of dreams I record involve me being alone at any point, and in those moments, I am always carrying with me some consciousness of being alone in relation to some specific person or a group of people. For example, recently had a dream that I was wandering alone through some seaside cliffs but was acutely aware I was supposed to be meeting up with my father.

The prevalence of others in my dreams has made me wonder if the purpose of dreaming in general is to work through subtle interpersonal dynamics. I read somewhere that there's a fragmentary, half-conscious form of dreaming that happens in deeper stages of sleep in which the mind cycles through various permutations of physical tasks, especially related to new skills. Like, if you had your first ever session of tennis that day, you will have these fragmentary dreams about gripping a racquet, swinging a racquet, intercepting balls, etc. It's why you're always more adept at a new physical skill after a night's sleep.

Makes sense to me that REM dreaming would serve a similar purpose, related to optimizing how we navigate through complex social realities. Sounds like my experience is not the norm though.

I'm on my ten minute Love Method break, sorry if the above is a little bleary.

Ah, it seems that the social may be less the point than the buildup or aftermath of it, at least, given your description. That's actually a strength for you, since it's a lot easier to do reality checks outside of social conditions. When you foresee yourself about to have a conversation, or just after one, you can do a reality check and it may help your success rate to do so. We're social creatures, so I think it's only natural that we dream about others frequently. For me, I have most often been alone in my dreams, especially the ones in which I become lucid. Even still, it's frequent that I dream about others, it's just not what is center stage for my dreams, personally.