How to stop dreaming about your ex
You have done the sensible things. Deleted the photos, stopped checking their profile, maybe met someone new. And still they arrive at night, and you wake up having to get over them all over again. It is exhausting, and it can feel like a failure of will. It is not. Dreams are not under the control of the will, which is exactly why they carry the feelings the will has pushed away.
Why trying not to think about them makes it worse
Psychologists have found that suppressing a thought during the day tends to make it more likely to appear in dreams. The effect is often called dream rebound. If you spend your waking hours refusing to think about your ex, you may be sending the feeling straight into the night. Jung put the same point another way: what is not made conscious returns. The way out is not more suppression but a different relationship to the feeling.
Step one: write the dreams down
Keep a notebook by the bed and write each ex dream as soon as you wake, in the present tense, with the strongest feeling noted. Add one line on what happened the day before. After two or three weeks, patterns usually appear: the dreams come after certain events, or the same scene keeps returning, or the ex is doing the same thing each time. Seeing the pattern takes some of the power out of it. Our guide to keeping a dream journal covers the practice in more detail.
Step two: ask what the ex stands for
In Jungian work the ex is usually an image the psyche has borrowed, a familiar face carrying something of yours. Ask three questions of the dream. What feeling about the relationship have I not let myself have? What pattern from that relationship am I repeating now? What part of me lived in that relationship and has not come with me? The guide to dreaming about your ex explores each of these. Once you have a sense of what the ex is carrying, the dream has less reason to keep delivering it.
Step three: finish what was left unsaid
Many ex dreams are conversations that never happened in waking life. Write a letter to your ex that you will not send. Say everything: the anger, the gratitude, the goodbye. Then, if it helps, write the reply you imagine. This is close to what Jung called active imagination: engaging an inner figure deliberately, while awake, so that the dream does not have to do it for you.
Step four: change the ending
If the same dream keeps repeating, try rehearsing a new ending while awake. Before sleep, replay the dream in your mind and change one thing: you walk away, or you say what you wanted to say, or the scene shifts somewhere else. A similar technique is used clinically for repeating nightmares. It does not guarantee a different dream, but it often loosens the repetition.
Look after the hours before sleep
Dreams draw on the day's emotional residue. Scrolling through old messages or their social media late at night is likely to put them in your dreams. So is going to bed after an argument about them, or replaying the breakup in your head as you fall asleep. Give the last half hour of your day to something unrelated. This will not stop the dreams on its own, but it reduces the daily fuel.
What not to do
Do not treat the dream as an instruction. Getting back in touch with an ex because of a dream rarely brings the resolution the dream seemed to promise, because the feeling it carries lives in you. Nor is the dream a sign that you are failing to move on. Dreams often keep processing long after the day has moved forward, and a dream that returns less often, or with less charge, is a sign of progress even if it has not yet stopped.
When the dreams are about an ex-husband, or someone long ago
The steps are the same, but the material differs. A marriage brings a larger structure into the dream; see dreaming about your ex-husband. An ex from years ago is often about who you were then; see dreaming about an ex years later. And if the dreams are frightening, nightmares about your ex covers when to talk to someone. For repetition in general, see our guide to recurring dreams.
A worked example: the ex who won't leave the flat
The dream below is invented for illustration. It shows the method, not anyone's real dream.
“Every few nights: I come home and my ex is in my new flat, unpacking his things as if he lives there. I tell him to leave and he ignores me. I wake up furious.”
The image
A new home, an ex moving in uninvited, and a dreamer whose instruction to leave is ignored.
Associations
The dreamer moved after the breakup. She describes the relationship as one where she “always gave way”. In her new job she has just agreed, again, to take on work that is not hers.
What it compensates
Her waking attitude is that the relationship is over and so the pattern is too. The dream, one possibility, says the pattern has moved into the new place with her. The ex is the face of her own habit of not being heard. The repetition will likely continue until she is heard somewhere.
A small practice
Before sleep, replay the dream and change one detail: she opens the door and he goes. In the day, decline one request that is not hers to carry.
Common questions
How can I stop dreaming about my ex?
You cannot switch the dreams off directly, but you can remove the reason they repeat. Write them down, look for what the ex stands for in your life now, and finish what was left unsaid, for instance in a letter you do not send. Most people find the dreams ease as this work is done.
Why do I still dream about my ex when I'm over them?
Being over someone in your daily life does not mean every feeling attached to the relationship has been felt. Dreams carry what the waking attitude leaves out. They can also return when something in the present echoes the relationship.
Does trying not to think about my ex stop the dreams?
Usually the opposite. Pushing a thought away during the day tends to make it more likely to appear at night. Giving the feeling deliberate attention, through writing or conversation, works better.
How long will I keep dreaming about my ex?
There is no fixed time. Many people notice the dreams change, becoming less intense or more peaceful, before they stop. That change is often a sign the underlying feeling is settling.
Written by Alexander George and reviewed against our editorial standards. Coniunctio offers reflection, not diagnosis or prediction. If a dream is tied to distress, please speak to a professional.
Related guides
What is Coniunctio?
A dream can stay with you all day and still make no sense. Coniunctio analyses it in Jung's method, symbol by symbol, so you can see what it is working on and what to do with it.
- A Jungian analysis of your dream, symbol by symbol
- A ritual to work with it: three offered, you choose one
- Follow-up questions and notes on every analysis
- A dream archive that grows as you feed it
“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness.”