Writing for Psych Central (https://psychcentral.com/), Sarah Barkley asks:
How can we interpret dreams about an ex-partner? Why do old relationships creep into dreams, and how might these ideas might help?
This is my response.
Flowers Have Thorns
Dreams are to life as preparing a garden is to picking flowers: preparation is required before things come up. You don’t dream about things; you dream about feelings. To understand dreams, you must first know something of how your thoughts are put together.
Thoughts draw from experience and represent important situations. Conscious thoughts aim for order and are ordered in sequence. We exert a measure of intentional control over our conscious thoughts.
Dreams are thoughts too, but they connect by relevance and association, not logic, causality, or identity. The meaning of dreams is in the layering of ideas, not the sequences of actions. This is how we think. We think in layers.
Dreams are not “interpreted” as such, as they are arrangements of inclinations. They do not give directions, explore options, or pass judgments, they are a re-assembling experience. In that regard, any experience that has importance is likely to appear in a dream juxtaposed with other relevant experiences.
Famously nonsensical, the point of the dream is not to make sense but to explore it, both as impressions and understandings. The characters in your dreams are internal reflections of your external world. They are either the actions you commit or attitudes you have committed to. That is to say, they’re all aspects of yourself either as victim, perpetrator, instigator, or witness.
Stumps into Bird Feeders
A person with whom you’ve had an important connection will appear as a landmark in dreams. They will represent a need, situation, or attitude; one that you created or invested in. Unfinished business will be especially prominent, not so much as the project itself but what it still means.
Traumas reappear not as they were or as you wished they would have been, but as reminders, attitudes, warnings, and invitations. They are not dangers or opportunities because they are externally neither real nor accurate. They are internal representations of your mental state. They are far from complete, and they are in need of fulfillment.
Dream experiences reintroduce enduring, vital energies. This might be love, in the case of someone who’s died, or frustration regarding your future. It’s not the thing, person, or event that embraces you, but the state of mind you have developed regarding them.
Dreams most often challenge normality and so are felt as disturbing. They infrequently endorse or support, and they can be made more positive if you become more involved with them. You can do this by taking them seriously and returning to their themes during the day before going to sleep.
Subjective Reality is Still Reality
I tell my clients their dream messages are invitations to more fully enter the emotional landscape of their daily life. That means, to establish connections between the dream feelings and things that evoke similar feelings in life. Dreams are creatures from the deep that do not come entirely to the surface. They cannot survive on the surface because the surface does not have enough emotion.
There are certain feelings we typically have difficulty processing, integrating, accepting, or resolving. These include grief, heartbreak, depression, trauma, fear, inadequacy, imprisonment, and meaninglessness. These feelings can be triggered, but they have an independent existence that is not historical. They are more than memories. Dreams express these feelings in order to orient us to deeper needs.
People who are insensitive to their dreams, or who reject their dreams, remain more attached to these feelings, making them both obsessive and avoidant. Remembering dreams is useful, but what’s most important is being emotionally responsive. This enables you to be affected by dreams without the need to recall them.
Your Most Vivid World
To get the most out of dreams, remember them. Anyone can achieve greater dream recall. With greater recall comes the opportunity to experience one’s feelings more authentically. What may only be an idea in waking life becomes a somatic feeling with greater impetus when shaped by a dream. The conscious minds sees separate things, the dreaming mind better understands relationships.
Dreams are evanescent, so it’s necessary to take notes. You don’t need to remember much, because you can unearth much of the dream when you start with a fragment. By doing this, you will explore the dream’s deeper images through the conscious reflections it creates.
What is the meaning of a dream about an ex-partner? The meaning is a layering of what you mean to yourself, what partnership means, and what it means to ex or be ex’ed. Since relationship is our most important indicator of meaning, follow your dreams of relationship.
The Purpose of Dreams and Dreaming of Partnership (podcast)