Dreaming about your ex.
Does dreaming about your ex mean you should get in contact, or get back together? No! So, what do these confusing dreams mean?
If you’re dreaming about an ex in the very early days of the breakup, your dreams are likely to be processing your feelings about it all. Take the feelings you experienced in your dream – anger, regret, betrayal, shame, loss, grief, missing out, taunted, dismissed, not good enough, relief, hope, freedom, whatever turned up for you in the dream – and separate them from the storyline of the dream. Just focus on the feelings. Do the dream feelings correspond with how you’re feeling about the breakup, or might these dream feelings be rumbling in your unconscious mind? Are you pushing these feelings away, or are you as yet unaware of these deeper emotions? The more you recognise and acknowledge your true feelings, the healthier you’ll be during your breakup and after. Healing and closure will arrive sooner. If you want more insight, turn back to the dream to explore the other details. (Learn how to interpret your own dreams or ask for help.)
Dreams that you have about your ex months, years, or decades later can be very worrying, until you understand them.
People often ask me why they dream of an ex when they have found closure and are very happily living life on their own or with a new partner. They worry that their dreams reveal an unconscious attraction or desire to be back with the ex, and they worry about what their dreams say about their current relationship. On the other side of the coin, people often contact me to ask why their partners are dreaming about an ex, and what can be done to stop the dreams. Occasionally couples come forward together to ask about their concerns.
Dreams about exes are symbolic.
Dreams are the result of your brain and mind processing your conscious and unconscious experiences of the last one to two days, and then comparing these to past similar experiences. Your brain and mind search for symbols to represent your experiences. Your ex may turn up to be a perfect symbol!
For example, if you’ve been experiencing issues with confidence, and your ex was super confident, or severely lacked confidence, or undermined your confidence, he or she may be a perfect dream symbol to represent ‘issues with confidence’. Your dream goes about its business of processing your confidence issues, marching out the ex as simple symbol.
Dreams are always about you.
Dreams aren’t about the people who appear in your dreams. You are not connecting with them in a twilight zone. There’s no undercover secret relationship going on in these dreams, other than the relationship you, the dreamer, have with yourself.
In this way, you can look at people in your dreams, including your exes, as symbols of aspects of yourself: symbols of your conscious or unconscious feelings, thoughts, beliefs, patterns of behaviour, personality, or attitude.
Whatever shape your relationship with your ex was like in the past, or is like now, their appearance in a dream should be welcomed. They bring a gift, an opportunity to get to know yourself more deeply. Well, let’s rephrase that. In choosing an ex as a dream symbol, your dreaming mind offers you a gift, an opportunity to get to know yourself more deeply. Your ex in real life has got absolutely nothing to do with it.
The challenge with these dreams is that they often feel so real, and ‘everyday’ in their storylines that it’s difficult to step away and see them as symbolic. You might have a dream about a purple crocodile flying above a raging ocean where a bizarre yacht race is in progress and you’d know – straight away on waking – that it was a dream. It couldn’t happen in real life. But when you wake up from a dream of an ex in an everyday setting, it’s harder to grasp that it’s symbolic. If your emotions were intense in the dream, it’s easy to think that it’s not in the same category as a normal dream. But it is.
How do you work out what your ex symbolises in your dream?
One tip is to ask yourself how you see the energy of your ex in real life. Is he or she short-tempered, forgiving, picky, adventurous, focussed, deceitful, supportive? What word – or words – come up? What energy did he or she show in the dream? This is a good starting point for discovering what your ex means as a dream symbol, but there are many more tools and techniques to employ when you interpret a dream. (My online course, How to Interpret Your Dreams Step-by-Step, gives you everything you need to be able to interpret your dreams and understand how they relate to your life and what you can take from them.)
Dreams of getting back together with an ex – with or without sex – are about getting together with parts of yourself, integrating aspects of yourself you have lost touch with, or integrating new aspects represented by your ex. What are you merging with in life? Do you feel good about this, or not so good? As a simple example, if you think of your ex as being studious, are you becoming more studious? If you think of your ex as being moody, are you becoming more aware of being moody yourself?
Dreams of getting back together with an ex can also reflect closure.
Interesting that, isn’t it? Such dreams may be more about forgiveness (of the ex and of yourself), taking the lessons and gifts of the relationship on board. The intimacy of the dream can reflect you integrating all of this into your sense of self, becoming at one with the past experience, moving forward all the wiser. Again, the ex in the dream is a symbol of what is happening within you.
These dreams of getting back together with an ex may also reflect feelings of slipping back into old ways, perhaps relating with your current partner in a similar way to how you related to an ex. You might regard these as warning dreams, or as dreams that help you to identify your relationship patterns. Again, it’s all about you. Your dream symbols and the other details in your dreams help you to understand yourself more deeply, and when you understand yourself more deeply, you understand why you experience life in the way that you do, and what you need to do to change this if you wish.
Another tip to help you understand dreams about your ex is to look at the dream as an allegory.
For example, if you dreamed of feeling victimised by your ex, where in your life are you feeling a victim or fearing being a victim? If you dreamed of helping your ex heal from a hurt, where in your life are you helping yourself to heal from an (emotional) hurt?
Are you having more dreams about your ex during this Covid pandemic?
Last weekend, I was a guest on ABC Radio Triple J’s The Hook Up, a show about sex and relationships. Their listeners were reporting having more dreams about their exes during the Covid pandemic, and they wanted to know why.
Typically, when a relationship ends, we encounter a period of uncertainty. Even if we have specific plans, we’re anticipating the change, and we’re not entirely sure how it will pan out. More often than not, though, our plans are less specific, perhaps even vague, and we don’t necessarily feel in control of how things are rolling out. Will it be a clean break, are there financial and other details to work out, where will you live? During this pandemic, uncertainty is rife, and many people are worrying about or experiencing similar issues to those they encountered when breaking up with their ex. The dreaming mind may pop an ex into a dream to symbolise change, uncertainty, or any of your feelings or concerns during the pandemic that resonate, for you, with your breakup. The ex may symbolise uncertainty, change, or an aspect of yourself that is dealing with this.
Lockdown, during the pandemic, forced us to re-examine our lives, our priorities, our selves. We processed this, and our fears, anxieties, stresses and raw emotions about the situation, in our dreams. No wonder our exes made more frequent appearances in dreams, symbolising aspects of ourselves that were under review. Our relationships potentially teach us more about ourselves than we may ever learn solo. They can bring out the best and the worst in us, they help us to confront our true self and how we respond under pressure. For all these reasons, exes make wonderful dream symbols of the best and the worst of us, elements we need to accept and integrate while we are doing the work of deciding what changes we wish to see, and to be, in the post-Covid world.
So, don’t dismiss those dreams about your ex, and don’t sweep them under the carpet in an effort to protect your current partner from concern. Talk about your dreams, find out how to interpret them, and use them to enrich life going forward.
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