Ex-relationship
Remember that in the your dreams your most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects and places of your dream. Therefore our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene. Our feeling of ambition might thus be portrayed as a business person in our dream – our changing emotions as the sea or a river; while the present relationship we have with our ambition or emotions is expressed in the events or plot of the dream.
So it is not your ex you are dreaming of, but your dreams are showing you your inner feelings about the past relationship and all the memories needing to be digested and learned from. Remember that because you were together for a while there is no way you can ‘have nothing to do’ with someone you have been intimately involved with. It doesn’t work like that. Most people are often totally unaware of the massive experience they take in during a relationship and how it interacts with them when we love someone. In other words the memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. See An experience of a person’s influence
So if you are troubled by dreams of your ex, the best way to deal with them is to work on integrating the influence left in you from the relationship. You can do this by thinking about the dreams about your ex and drawing on all you got from him or her. So I would suggest you integrate all the good and bad things. Try doing this by taking the dream images of your ex and pulling them back into your body. Yes, literally making them one with you. Do this slowly and allow any feelings that arise. This may sound strange but all the images in our dreams are projections from you inner world onto the screen of our sleeping mind; so taking them back into you is like owning them and integrating them. It is called honouring what we learned, bad or good, from the relationship. Think of it like digesting something. In a relationship, whether a feeling relationship or one in which you are learning something, you often absorb things from the person. You might take in such things unconsciously, as you did many things from parents and from the culture you were raised in. So the process of absorption in a dream may refer to such influences you are taking in. See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Comments
Hi there again. I was dumped by my man and in my dream I wanted some closure. He never told me anything I wanted to hear in the dream. But I dreamed that I had his child, a boy (which is not so) and that I had to abandon the child because of our split. I live in a foreign country and felt like I would never see the child again. I asked the child not to forget me. But my ex told me I can have the child. My feeling was – how could I be so naive thinking this man would want my child…I wonder what this mean? Thank you very much for your time
Dear Svetlana – I think it will be helpful to explore what your dream figure means with “closure”, because of what is expressed in the rest of the dream.
Also you do not reveal what it is that you wanted to hear in the dream.
While being in a relationship with your now ex-partner, you were able to give birth to a new part of yourself; and it got a chance to grow; the boy child in your dream.
The way I see your dream is that you have mixed up (projected) all sorts of thoughts and ideas – http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/projection/
You ask the child not to forget you, and it is what you would rather do now; forget/abandon the child.
You feel “how could I be so naive thinking this man would want my child” and so you merely project onto him your own feelings of not wanting this child (anymore).
Not wanting the child is like cutting off a part of you that you were able to give birth to and that has grown inside you and that once cared for and loved could mature.
See http://dreamhawk.com/pregnancy-childbirth/the-baby-in-your-dream/
and
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/archetype-of-the-animus-jungs-view-of-the-male-in-the-female/
So why not choose again and honour what you have learned in your relationship with him?
Anna 🙂
What does it mean when your ex-best friend who in reality had a sexual relationship with your husband but now all of a sudden she is in my dreams and we are actually happy? even though this is far from the case?
Dear Cindy – I believe your dream expresses that it will be helpful to digest this experience so you can be best friends with her in your inner world.
Each person, object or even place in a dream should not be thought of as a symbol, such as a road sign that needs interpretation. A person or object is a living part of you, just as your hand is not a symbol it is a living part of you. As such a person is alive and responsive, with enormous depths. And a good inner friend is a wonderful aid in your life, an aid that can see you through the difficult times, and show you a new side of yourself.
Few of us realise we have a reptilian and mammalian brain built into us and underlying our human brain, nevertheless we do. The reptilian brain is what gives us the fight or flight response, the territorial response that causes so much conflict in some countries, and it is also behind our sexual response. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/brain-levels-and-dreams/
Those responses were not learned in this lifetime, but are there nevertheless, even though we cannot remember them or even talk about them unless we have learnt about them in some way. This suggests we have part of us we call ‘me’ our personality, which only has partial memory, and also an instinctive part of us which we often call the unconscious which has an enormous memory.
But most of us have not recognised these animal drives in us, let alone integrated them.
See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/integration-meeting-oneself/
and
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/archetype-of-the-animal/
Anna 🙂