Rachel’s erotic dreams from an early episode of Friends get graded by an expert, praising some aspects but pointing out the show’s dated humor.
An expert analyzes Rachel’s erotic dreams from a Friends episode. It’s late in the show’s first season, in an episode titled “The One With the Ick Factor,” that Rachel confesses to having erotic dreams about Chandler. In a running gag throughout the episode, as these dreams recur, Ross feels insecure because of his crush on Rachel. Rachel also shares one dream she had about Chandler and Joey together, saying, “there were times when it wasn’t even me,” with the implication played for laughs at the time.
In a video for Penguin Books UK, neuroscientist, neurosurgeon, and dream doctor Rahul Jandial watches the scenes with Rachel’s dreams and grades their accuracy:
Jandial, while promoting his book This Is Why You Dream, looked at several dream-related scenes in pop culture. When it comes to Friends, Jandial says that the episode is dated in using the comment about Chandler and Joey as a punchline. However, in other aspects, Jandial praises Friends and says it’s accurate as far as how the sharing of dreams is a sign of closeness within a group. Overall, the dream doctor gives the scene a 6 out of 10 for accuracy. Read the full quote below:
Two things about erotic dreams: One, they tend to be with people close to us. friends, sometimes family, and even bosses. So that’s an important take, right there, is that it’s in her peer group. It’s in her friend group that she had an erotic dream about. Number two, although the group tends to be small and narrow and close to you, the acts reported can be quite wild. So maybe that’s where they’re coming in with, you know, they were intimate on that table.
For therapists and others working on relationships, they find dream sharing is important. Not so much the content of the dream, but the emotional milieu, the environment of the dream, and the trust required to share that with somebody, sometimes guided with a therapist. So there’s a whole space of dream sharing, I think, is interesting to look into.
I mean, the show is dated, so we have to take it into context here. But bisexuality in surveys of erotic dreams seems to be more common. I think if there is a link, when we bring more people with more diverse voices into these questionnaires and surveys, I think we’ll have a better shot of figuring that out. So if we were to rank 0 to 10, with 10 being most accurate, how well this episode or the scene from Friends captures erotic dreams, I’ll give it a 6.
The Dream Storyline Proves One Advantage Of Friends’ Early Seasons
The Show Had a Lot More Flexibility
Although later Friends seasons became more focused on the pairings of Rachel and Ross and Monica and Chandler, the early years had a sense of casual exploration befitting the dream storyline. Although the saga of Ross and Rachel is still important, the writers more freely experimented with the potential couples before the London episodes where Monica and Chandler get together for the first time.
There’s an argument to be made that the polarizing Joey and Rachel storyline would have been better received if it happened in the first few seasons of the NBC comedy. In the same vein, as the writers have mentioned in books and retrospectives, there was an idea about pairing Monica with Joey. It’s a stark difference from the show’s later seasons, in which there’s only a question of how the endgame pairings end up together.
There is, in other words, a charm to the early episodes before Friends becomes an absolute pop culture juggernaut that has to contend with satisfying the hopes of audiences. It’s perhaps the truest form of what the series hoped to evoke in viewers, which is the feeling of hanging out with a close-knit group without any expectations for where that might lead.
