Why Do I Dream About My Ex?

A very common question is: “Why do I keep dreaming about my ex-girlfriend/boyfriend all the time?” or “my first love,” or something similar. This can feel troubling, especially if the relationship ended long ago and you’re happy in a new relationship. What do these dreams mean – should you reach out to him or her?

No, you shouldn’t (at least not for that reason). In all likelihood, the dreams are not about the person in question. Our dreams do not reflect other people but rather our own, largely unconscious psyche. It’s aspects of yourself you’re seeing, not aspects of other people.

When I was fourteen years old, I fell hopelessly in love with a girl in my new class. It was as if a thundercloud rumbled through my inner being when I saw her, and my love for her only deepened after we spent a night together, on a couch during a school trip  (a tender, platonic closeness). I became sick with love, it was like a fever. But we never became a couple – and that was for the best. How could she possibly handle my “hundred thousand volts from the heavens”? How could it have been anything other than a disaster?

Yet I still dream about her, even decades later. She is a recurring, almost exclusively positive figure in my dreams, representing, in a broad sense, eros. The dream figure does not represent the real girl I fell in love with, in other words. So, what has happened here?

It’s about a projection, in this case of the anima (or a certain aspect of her). It may sound trivial and clichéd, but trust me, the projection of an archetype is no small matter. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, and countless other stories bear witness to how serious it can be. One’s teenage ego is nothing compared to an archetype that crashes over you from behind. When I found out that my beloved had started a relationship with one of my closest friends, I became ill, bedridden with a high fever for an entire week. My experience with this girl was anything but trivial – perhaps clichéd, yes, as it was an archetypal pattern I was living through, but that doesn’t make the experience shallow; on the contrary, it was profound, fundamentally overwhelming.

It’s been a very long time since we met, but as I said, she still appears in my dreams. Or does she, actually? No, the actual woman no longer has anything to do with it; my dreams clothe a rather specific inner content in her guise. It’s been ages since the dream figure had anything to do with the person; it’s an independent, autonomous figure in my inner landscape.

What happened to me was thus a projection of the anima, let’s say the inner, archetypal femininity, or “the man’s inner woman.” But it’s actually more descriptive if we refer to the content as a soul-image, which, according to Jung, is essentially a synonym to anima/animus. In his “Definitions,” the heading of the section reads as follows: “SOUL-IMAGE [Anima/Animus].” Jung writes in a paragraph under it:

“Whenever an impassioned, almost magical, relationship exists between the sexes, it is invariably a question of a projected soul-image.” (Psychological Types, par. 809.)

When I was a young teenager, I couldn’t understand why I fell so deeply in love with this girl – not only because she wasn’t “my type,” but also because, the first time I saw her, she was making a grimace and giving the middle finger to a classmate. It was in that very moment that I noticed her, and something stirred in my unconscious psyche.

I was, in fact, identified with my super cool persona and, so to speak, cast my gaze upon my soul. It was something foreign to me, frightening, and profoundly awe-inspiring. But it was not meant for us to become a couple – the projection didn’t occur so that we could marry and live happily ever after, but to give me the opportunity to establish a conscious relationship with my soul.

The distinguished Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson suggests that these “hundred thousand volts from the heavens” are fundamentally a religious experience and not something to be placed on another person. (“Slender Threads,” YouTube; We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.) How could the girl in question possibly carry my soul, with its hundred thousand volts, and how could I expect her to embody my soul? Even though, as I lay awake yet another night, sleepless with thoughts of her, I certainly wouldn’t have accepted it at the time, it wasn’t about her. She was merely an exceptionally suitable recipient of my projection – a star in the sky rather than a girl of flesh and blood.

“Many men and women have chosen not to marry the one they first fell in love with, and then later in analysis this first love appears in dreams as personifications of their anima or animus. Had they married, one can see that it would have been a disaster, creating a lot of difficulties. The unconscious wisdom which prevented them from marrying is the same instinct which drives the primitive to tell such stories and say, ‘Don’t look at the stars’.” (Marie-Louise von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, p. 65–66.)

Even if not everyone has the same experience as I did, many have similar experiences with a woman or a man – namely, that one projects an unconscious content, usually the anima or animus, onto the other. You never became a couple, or you were for a time, and yet, years later, you still dream about her or him.

This very fact – that the other person appears in your dreams some time after the relationship has ended – underscores the subjective nature of the image. As long as the relationship, whatever its nature, is ongoing, the partner as a dream figure likely cannot simultaneously function as an independent soul-image. The projection onto the other must cease before the figure, in this capacity, can begin to appear in our inner world.

In my case, at least, it happened that when my enchantment faded and I entered a relationship with another woman, the dream figure in the form of my first love began to appear in my dreams as a soul-image.

In my first dream about her, I’m on a sinking boat. I’m afraid of drowning, but I see what she does and do the same, and in this way, I’m saved; then we sit in the same boat with blankets around our shoulders. Thus, we can see how the woman as an inner image, already in the first dream, is associated with the unconscious, the sea, and acts as a guide (both very characteristic of the anima) – and that she has nothing to do with the external, objective woman.

As such, “she” continues to appear in my dreams. Just the other week, I dreamed that we were embracing each other in a kind of mutual gratitude. The external woman I haven’t seen in ten years or more, and aside from a quiet fondness, I feel nothing particular for her.

Since the question “why do I dream about my ex” is so common, and as I myself have considerable experience with it (even though she is not literally an ex), I’ve focused on this specifically. But the dynamic applies to dreams in general. In most cases, our dream figures symbolize some more or less unconscious content within us. If the figure “is” a person we know, it likely represents something we’ve unconsciously projected onto that external person. Through associations, one can often figure out what it’s about.

We generally find it quite difficult to understand dream figures in this way. If I dream about an acquaintance, I immediately think of the actual person. It requires some mental effort to let go of the objective person and focus on the subjective figure. The person in question is only relevant for my associations, my attempts to understand what the dream figure within me represents. When I write about such dream figures in my journals, I always use a lowercase initial letter – “bob” instead of “Bob,” for example. This makes it easier for me to distinguish between the inner figure and the external person.

But to return to the title of the text: The answer to the question is usually that we’ve unconsciously projected a content, or symbol, onto the other, that then appears in our dreams in the guise of that person. So you can rest easy – dreams about your ex are most likely not about your ex, but about parts of your inner self seeking your attention.