Telling your dreams before breakfast
Telling your dreams before breakfast could make a bad one come true in Greek tradition, and an Oklahoma family called it unlucky. Each tradition gives a nightmare somewhere to go, which leaves you to decide who gets yours.
What it may mean
Families disagree sharply about what to do with a bad dream in the morning, and nearly all of them give it somewhere to go. In Greek tradition a nightmare told before you eat will come true, while a good dream told early on purpose will not, because the gods see through the trick. An Armenian mother taught her daughter to tell the bad dream to running water in the sink so it would wash away. A family with Costa Rican roots told it to the people who appeared in it, and in Germany some said never to tell a dream at all. An Oklahoma nurse was handed a banana before she could tell her mother a bad dream, and she passed the rule on. Underneath sits a real question: who, or what, receives your night fears, and do you choose that listener or just tell whoever is in the kitchen?
Depending on how you saw it
Telling a good dream
The Greek version has a sting for optimists: tell a lovely dream before breakfast hoping to make it come true, and it will not. Lots of people keep good news to themselves for the same reason. Which good news do you hold back for fear of jinxing it?
Telling it to running water
The Armenian practice turns the bathroom sink into a listener: turn on the faucet, say the dream, let it go down the drain. The informant kept doing it into adulthood for the comfort. Where do you set down a worry when there is nobody to tell?
Telling the people in it
In the family with Costa Rican roots, the cure for a nightmare was to tell the people who had appeared in it, or the dream would come true. That makes for some odd conversations at school or work. Who has turned up in your worries lately that you have not actually spoken with?
Why it happens in nature
Most dreams fade within minutes of waking unless they are repeated or written down, while vivid or upsetting ones are the likeliest to be remembered and retold. Telling a dream soon after waking helps fix it more firmly in memory, which may be one reason several of these customs put a pause before the telling.
What folk beliefs say
Greece
In Greek tradition, a bad dream told to someone before you eat anything will come true; a good dream told before eating in an attempt to make it come true will not, because the gods see through the trick.
Source: Rebecca Witzel (collector), Greek Nightmares (USC Digital Folklore Archive) (2014), folklore.usc.edu. View the page
Armenia
An Armenian mother taught her daughter to tell a nightmare to the running water in the bathroom sink the next morning, so it would be washed away and not come true.
Source: Nicole Vartanyan (collector), Nightmares to the Water (USC Digital Folklore Archive) (2013), folklore.usc.edu. View the page
Costa Rica (family lore)
In a family with Costa Rican roots, a person who had a nightmare had to tell the people who were in it, or the nightmare would come true.
Source: yaejinch (collector), Tell Nightmares (USC Digital Folklore Archive) (2016), folklore.usc.edu. View the page
Oklahoma, United States
A family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, held that discussing dreams before breakfast is unlucky; a child with a bad dream had to eat something first.
Source: jrayburn (collector), Talking About Nightmares (USC Digital Folklore Archive) (2016), folklore.usc.edu. View the page
Germany
Some Germans, a 1903 collection says, held that you must never relate a dream if you do not wish for trouble.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 224. View the page
To reflect on
Who receives your night fears, and did you choose that listener?