💭Dear Curious Readers,

Have you ever woken up from a dream and thought: Why did they appear? 

They may have been your old classmate that you haven’t spoken to since middle school, a childhood friend you completely forgot about, or even someone famous and out of reach. Yet, somehow, your sleeping brain decided to make them appear in tonight’s dream.  

This random incident comes from our brains being creative by putting together pieces of memories, emotions, and experiences from different points in our lives. So, let’s take a little journey into the dreaming brain and find out why someone from our past can suddenly resurface. 

🌙 Our Memories & Dreams. 

When we think back to an experience, we don’t remember all the details like a video. Instead, memories are made up of different pieces: people, places, emotions, sounds, conversations, and other details. Over time, these memories can also be changed or reconstructed rather than remaining perfect copies of the original experiences. In fact, our brains continually update and reorganize memories as we gain new experiences (FIvush & Grysman, 2022). 

🔖This means that even if you are not consciously thinking about someone for years, pieces of that person can still exist, buried deep into the memory network. Your brain may still have connections between that person and a particular place, period of your life, emotion, or experience. This is why different people in the same memory may recall the entire experience in a completely different view, and when this experience pops up in a discussion again, the people involved may be confused or intrigued by the other perspective.  Your memories don’t simply disappear.

So, when you are dreaming, your brain has plenty of old material to work with!

💭Dreams are memory mash-ups with fragments from different experiences. These fragments are like LEGO pieces that your sleeping brain combines to create a new storyline. The LEGO pieces coming together could be random or not. This process is called memory consolidation, where memories become integrated into our brains after we experience something. A 2023 meta-analysis found a significant relationship between dreaming about recently learned information and improved memory performance, suggesting that dreams can sometimes reflect memory-processing activity during sleep. (Hudachek & Wamsley, 2023). Furthermore, some LEGO pieces process emotions too. This could explain why dreaming about someone from our past can feel sentimental. Afterwards, when you wake up, you might feel happy, sad, nostalgic, embarrassed, or even confused without knowing why. These emotions can feel real because your brain is capable of creating a genuine emotional experience when dreaming. 

So, sleep appears to be connected to dreaming and memory processing.

🤷‍♀️Now, Why Them?

One possibility is that the person is connected to a memory or emotion that is relevant to you. You may not be missing that person. Instead, your brain simply activated a memory network that included them inside it. Sometimes, the person themselves is less important than the emotion or memory network associated with them. Dreams are complicated. Sometimes a dream can reflect something emotionally meaningful to you, but there is no universal dictionary to define situations. Sometimes our brains just like to create absolute nonsense. Every dream is a new adventure waiting. 

With that, currently, we do not have a complete explanation for why dreams happen or exactly why a particular person appears. Dream research is an evolving field, and scientists are continuing to investigate how dreaming relates to memory, emotion, and consciousness. So, the next time you wake up thinking about your dream, know that your brain simply found an old LEGO piece and decided it belonged in tonight’s story 📖.

Thanks for sticking to the end! Let’s continue to be kind to ourselves and stay curious!

Yours Truly,

✨Angelina C.✨

References

BloomHouse Marketing. (2025, July 25). Dreaming about someone? What it could mean. La Jolla Mental Health -. https://lajollamentalhealth.com/dreaming-about-someone-what-it-could-mean/

Cherry, K. (2026). What does it mean when you dream about someone? In Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-does-it-mean-when-you-dream-about-someone-7510785

Fivush, R., & Grysman, A. (2022). Accuracy and reconstruction in autobiographical memory: (Re)consolidating neuroscience and sociocultural developmental approaches. WIREs Cognitive Science, 14(3). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1620

Hudachek, L., & Wamsley, E. J. (2023). A meta-analysis of the relation between dream content and memory consolidation. Sleep, 46(12). https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsad111

Scarpelli, S., Bartolacci, C., D’Atri, A., Gorgoni, M., & De Gennaro, L. (2019). The functional role of dreaming in emotional processes. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(10). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00459