It turns out that what happens in bed can complicate relationships.

My girlfriend calls me in the morning with that playful, groggy voice: "I just had this dream . . ."

"Yeaaa?" I say with that playful, wow-this-is-actually-the-exact-moment-I-wanted-to-have-a-conversation-about-unicorns voice. I'm working in my dorm, just minutes from hers. Now I'm fearing the drop-in.

"This guy at church," she says, "he won the lottery and moved into our house. It was so weird."

"It was so weird" is a phrase both of us feel the need to repeat 17 times on average while recounting a dream to the other. "I was frying an egg and then I had to fight off the cast of That '70s Show with strips of bacon, but I made them too crispy and they broke," I'll say. "It was so weird." Of course it was weird. It was a dream.

Dreams can be difficult to discuss, even with my girlfriend of a year and a half. Sometimes I think, what's the use? Best-case scenario, I merely appear completely insane.

And what starts as harmless morning small talk may lead to a Freudian free-for-all of overanalyzing.

I hang up. She dreamed of another guy at her house?

I sip my coffee and forget about it, browsing the headlines and drifting into my normal morning thoughts. But then it's back to her dream, the description of which now rings with a potency that grows with time - like a lesson from a grandfather or a lyric from a Journey song. So she sees being with that other guy as synonymous with winning the lottery, huh? Getting out of this relationship as a stroke of luck?

Maybe she wants something. The house - she wants to move in together. The church - she's praying for a way out.

The lottery - she wants to go to Foxwoods?

Now I've learned, as I should have suspected, that you can, in fact, do things to annoy your significant other when you're not even awake. Her asking what I dreamed about is the classic "What are you thinking?" trap with a heat-seeking tip. It's "What are you thinking when you're knocked out and not able to filter your thoughts and your defenses are down . . . hmm?"

So I'll say, "You. I was dreaming of a big picture of you. There were roses all around it, and then you actually ran through the picture of you, busted right through it like you were coming out to a football game, and then we sat and talked all day about who you would be in the movie Mean Girls if it had been based on your high school. Then we danced."

Discussing dreams can be a kooky way to get to know each other on the subconscious level, something between a corny icebreaker game and a Rorschach ink-blot test. But because of the associations dreams have with our deepest, darkest thoughts, conversations about them risk appearing to recapitulate the relationship - and any insecurities about it.

"I dreamed about tacos."

You feel wrapped up? You think we're cheesy? Sometimes soft? We need to add something to spice things up? Yo quiero someone else!?

Like relationships, dreams bring us to the edge of logic. Both draw out a part of ourselves we can't see on our own. Dating, like dreaming, often becomes a streaming, fluctuating rhapsody, something that can be bliss and terror in the same evening. Some relationships are dreams from which you never want to awake. Others are, well, nightmares.

Perhaps the biggest similarity is that both dreams and relationships have been idealized into something unrealistically perfect, while we all know the two are more often bizarre, unique, and unpredictable.

So my girlfriend and I have learned not to take dream interpretation too seriously, that sometimes I simply watched That '70s Show before bed and wanted bacon for breakfast.

And whenever I hear somebody saying they are looking for someone to "share their dreams with," I always picture two people walking on a beach, at sunset, wielding overdone breakfast meats.