Why do we dream about things people haven’t done — like cheating? Can our dreams predict the future? Doze spoke to three experts to find out what’s actually going on between us and our partner when we’re asleep.

There is nothing stranger than waking up in the morning and being met face to face with the very same person who was just a moment ago rejecting you. Well, rejecting you in your subconscious. Then, here comes the anger, the betrayal, and rationally you know this is fed by nothing concrete. So why does it still sting?

“The less surreal and bizarre a dream is, the more it looks like everyday life, the more tempting it is to say that the dream is a reflection of life exactly as it seems.” Says Jane Teresa Anderson, dream analyst and author.

Before we look at what it means to dream about a partner in this way, we must establish what it means to dream about people at all.

“Our dreams are all about us and our different parts of ourselves,” Jane continues, “We’re not really dreaming about our relationship with that person or anything about that person, our dreaming mind has picked that person to represent something about us.

“Take my friend Claire, what three words would I use to describe Claire? Claire is kind, she’s quick thinking, but she can sometimes not listen properly. I might then think about the last couple of days, kindness came up as an issue, or I was really rushing around, and I wasn’t paying attention and listening to someone who really needed to be listened to.”

Helen Marlo, clinical psychologist and professor, disagrees to an extent, suggesting that it’s a bit of a cliché to say that people in our dreams are always an aspect of ourselves, “It isn’t always true. It often is but not always, that’s too absolute of a theory.”

“If we have a dream about another person, it could be giving us data about what is happening in our life right now that we don’t consciously want to look at, we all have defences that we throw up that prevents us from seeing things.

“We have to sift through our dreams, look at the data and ask, is this you? Is this the dance we’re doing together? Or is it something within me?”

So, is my partner cheating on me? 

The truth is there’s no real way to tell. It’s a person-to-person, relationship-to-relationship issue. But our experts helped us to establish some basic reasons that can guide your daytime decoding of such dreams.

“I had a client who dreamt that her boyfriend was cheating on her,” Alwin Wagener, a professor who looks specifically at the relationship between dreams and trauma, told Doze. 

“She walked in on the boyfriend cheating and she wasn’t sure what to make of it as she had no feelings that he was going to cheat. This gets into a lot of traditional beliefs about what dreams are: do they predict the future? Do they let you in on secrets or give you divine guidance?”

“In this case, it seemed to relate more to the sense that the boyfriend was almost cheating on her with video games, and it seemed to capture that sense of betrayal. So, working with figuring out where this betrayal came from could change how she was approaching it.”

On the other hand, it might not be about betrayal on your partner’s behalf, but actually you being unfaithful to yourself. “Where dreams about people become most powerful, is when someone dreams about their partner cheating on them,” Jane said.

“People think they’re zoning in on information of them unconsciously knowing their partner is cheating. It’s never ever about that, ever. If your partner is cheating on you, your mind will probably come up with different symbols.

“What that dream probably boils down to is that you’re betraying yourself. A simple example is, I’m not going to eat chocolate this week but yesterday I had the tiniest little bit of chocolate. So, my dream was about me cheating on myself. The more often you look for these symbols, the more you divorce the person in your dream from the actual person out there.”

This aspect of ourselves being revealed can occasionally be more literal. “Maybe you are emotionally cheating with someone,” says Helen.

“In some instances,” she continues, “with dreaming about your husband cheating on you, it’s an aspect of your psyche picking up on things about him that causes concern, 

“In some senses it can be that you’re picking up future events. It could be an inner knowing, your husband may be away a lot, less loving to you less physical to you, so you could dream that he is having an affair that turns out to be true.”

Alwin seems to agree that it’s hard to differentiate rationality from spirituality when we have such specific dreams, but comments, “we dream all the time about things that are relevant to us, and eventually that’s going to line up with things that happen in the future.”

“Cognitive research and understanding the scientific process of dreaming does not take away from the idea that there can be transcendent experiences and spiritual visions. There is normally a neurological process underlying it, but maybe there’s occasionally some spiritual aspects that happen too.”

“The complicated thing about dreams,” Jane adds, “is there are these odd cases where you can kind of connect telepathically but it’s very specific. If you dream of someone who’s about to die and then they die, it may feel very strange. But it is such a tiny percentage of dreams.”

Essentially, your brain is very good at picking up on things you miss, which may ultimately feel like predicting the future.

How can we navigate a partner cheating in our dreams? 

When we have these dreams, it can be difficult to know how to act around your partner, posing questions on our relationships and self-esteems. 

“That’s the extreme way that it works, they’re saying they haven’t done anything, and of course you aren’t going to respond too well,” Jane says.

“When an x-ray technician looks at an x-ray and says, yep, that looks pretty good to me, or hm looks like there’s problems here, we can say the same about dreams.” Says Helen. “The more seasoned you are in understanding dreams, the more you can differentiate literal dreams to symbolic.”

“I would try not to take it literally or foretelling, I would ask yourself what comes to mind when your reflecting on this dream.”

It may be difficult at first but try not to immediately hurl your partner out of bed when presented with these dreams, it may just be an inner aspect of yourself you need to decode.

“Dreams have a language of their own, and just like any other foreign language, we have to learn the language of dreams.”