New Delhi, Sept. 26 -- I used to dream alarmingly often of being stuck in some enormous complex of buildings with everyone I know having evaporated. I'm left among a handful of strangers, the day is drawing to a close and it's turning dark. I don't know how to get home, from which I'm far away. Somehow, I never think to use my phone and call someone. In fact, smartphones are strangely missing from any of my dreams. I'm amazed to find I'm not the only one to find that this is so.

A dream researcher, Dr Kelly Bulkeley, studied some 16,000 dream narratives and found that smartphones and computers feature in only up to 3.5% of the cases. That's odd, considering some of us spend the whole day interacting with tech in some way or the other. In...