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.