It’s a wildly common phenomenon, but when it happens to me, I invariably feel a little bit crazy: I go to sleep feeling perfectly fine about the end of my last relationship, then wake up confused and slightly sad because I’ve spent the night dreaming about my ex.
Luckily, the research shows that I’m not alone. It’s completely normal for someone you cared about to make a cameo in your dreams, according to dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, PhD. Barrett is a psychology lecturer at Harvard, past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and author of the 2010 book The Committee of Sleep, which explores how notable creative minds in art, music, film, science, literature, and other fields have used revelations in their dreams to inform their work.
“Triggers can include an anniversary of a death or a breakup or a divorce decree,” Barrett told the New York Times in 2022. “But dreams can also be a reaction to how we feel about our present relationships.” In other words, dreaming about your ex doesn’t necessarily mean you’re pining for them or dying to rekindle your relationship at some preconscious level; it might just mean you’re trying to work out more recent emotions that have come up since the breakup.
Below, find everything you need to know about why we dream about exes—and what to do about it.
Why do we dream?
Good luck getting dream researchers to agree about that, per Dr. Barrett. “Some more neurological types will say that we have rapid-eye-movement sleep, in which most dreams occur, for necessary biochemical things that the body needs to do, like replenishing certain sets of neurotransmitters that get depleted through waking, consolidating memory, and resetting temperature regulation,” she says. “Physiologic people like to say that dreams don’t have a function, that they’re a side effect of what our body needs to be doing physically during this time.”
But dreams also help us visualize more vividly and feel emotions more strongly than most of us are capable of when we’re awake, and they help us think outside the box, with the logic areas tamped down. For those reasons, we’re able to work through problems better in dreams than in waking hours. “Dreams are about all of our hopes and fears,” Dr. Barrett says. “Just about anything that we ever think about turns up in dream content. They’re about trying to problem solve things we’re facing in real life.”
Is it normal or common to dream about an ex?
Most people dream about their exes to some extent. “Dreaming about an ex just means they were a significant person in your past,” Dr. Barrett says. The people who you spent intense amounts of time with at any period of your life and who were important to you are likely to show up in your dreams, she notes, and that, of course, includes your exes, as well as parents and other family members or close friends. “Even if they’ve died or moved away or you’ve long lost touch with them, anybody you interacted with a lot will still be a significant person in some part of your unconscious for the rest of your life.”
Common dreams about exes—and possible readings
Each person’s dream about an ex is likely to have a meaning that’s entirely specific to them, involving both their feelings toward that ex and their life circumstances at the moment. Remember that meaning can vary widely from person to person—for example, a dog can mean safety and loyalty to one person or fear and anxiety to another. “For most dream elements, it’s a matter of what is this to the dreamer?” Dr. Barrett says. She also warns that the dreams may not be about that particular person, but more about issues one may have in the present.
Here are some broadly common dreams that can suggest certain underlying issues and unresolved feelings.
Maybe you were dumped by someone you were deeply in love with—a devastating experience, not to mention a significant ego blow, that may leave you wondering whether you did something wrong or perhaps weren’t “good enough” for them. Dreaming about getting back together with your ex, or your ex apologizing and saying they still love you, is a wish-fulfillment dream based on the subconscious desire to feel good about yourself again. Dreaming about breaking into your ex’s home might seem troubling, but really, it’s subconsciously related to the need to understand what happened and get inside their head and mindset. (In other words, don’t take it as a sign to act out IRL!)
If you’ve been in a relationship for a while and it’s become a bit too routine and comfortable, you may yearn for the passion of an earlier coupling—especially your first real love, which is imprinted on the psyche to represent love, desire, and passion. The following dreams may signify wanting to recapture those positive feelings in your waking life:
A) You have sex with them.
B) You get back together.
C) You search for them.
D) You care for children with them.
E) You see them out and about and are trying to get their attention.
F) You try to save them from some death or danger.
Dreams about exes may have nothing to do with them—or love, desire, or sex—specifically. Sometimes they represent who you were at that prior point in your life. If you dream about getting back together or having sex with an ex, it could simply mean that you long for who you were or what your life was like when you were with them.
Being cheated on or in an abusive relationship can leave a deep imprint on one’s psyche and lead to an ex appearing in dreams. If you dream you are being yelled at or cheated on, you may be experiencing some degree of similar feeling in your real life, or you may be still upset with yourself for being in that earlier relationship. Dreaming about your ex leaving you, on the other hand, may not necessarily be about the trauma of a breakup but could be about broader issues of rejection stemming from childhood, nonromantic relationships, or other abuse in one’s past.
“Your subconscious is trying to reason with you and let you know that your ex has moved on and has a new life,” suggests author and dream analyst Lauri Loewenberg: “They have other things going on and you need to do the same.” Harsh, but fair!
When should you be concerned?
In general, you shouldn’t worry about dreaming about an ex. But if the dreams are consistently unpleasant and disturbing, Dr. Barrett advises seeing a therapist. “It may be a negative experience you haven’t completely resolved—it may also be that some things in your current life are stirring that up. Think about what in your waking life may be triggering this, even if it’s not as extreme as what the dream is depicting.”
At the other end of the spectrum, she says, “If you’re having extremely erotic, wonderful, safe, secure dreams about the ex over and over, I would tend to suggest therapy to work on what the dreams are about and what may be unresolved from the previous relationship.”
If you are in a relationship, should you feel guilty?
“You should never feel guilty about anything in a dream,” Dr. Barrett stresses. “Our unconscious just runs all over the place and has no effect on the waking real world. You’re not responsible for what you dream. It’s not doing something bad to your current partner, but it may be signaling that there’s something you want in life that you’re not getting from your current partner.” Potent emotional dreams, either positive or negative and especially involving repetitive themes, are worth paying attention to, she says. Consider asking yourself what they’re telling you about your waking life.
