Dreaming About Having Sex With Your Ex

It’s not unusual to dream about having sex with your ex. Many dumpees have sexual dreams (among other ex-dreams) – especially during the first month of the breakup when their ex is on their mind the most. The reason they have these dreams is that they have unrequited feelings for their ex and want their ex to acknowledge them and validate them.

They basically want to feel adored by the person who rejected them and boost their self-esteem. That’s why their brain makes them dream about their ex giving them attention and affection in ways that make them feel whole again.

Some dumpees dream about kissing or hugging their ex, some dream about their ex being with someone else, whereas others dream about sleeping with their ex and their ex coming back to them.

If you’re having any of these dreams, you need to understand that most dumpees dream about their ex in one way or another. Most dumpees have expectations of their ex and hope that those expectations come true.

You can’t do much about such expectations and ex-dreams if you’re brokenhearted and need your ex to recover. You probably can’t stop thinking about your ex when you’re awake, so don’t think it’s supposed to be much different when you’re asleep.

Your mind works even when you’re sleeping as the cortex continues unabated during sleep.

You see, thoughts and dreams after the breakup have a self-soothing purpose. Their objective is to help you look for solutions that allow you to process the problems at hand and make you feel in control of your life again.

If you had no thoughts and dreams about your ex, you simply wouldn’t be hung up on your ex. You’d be over your ex and ready to date someone else.

It’d be a slightly different story though if years had gone by and you still dream about having sex with your ex. In that case, it probably wouldn’t mean that you’re still in love with your ex (unless you feel that you are), but that the pain and suffering your ex has caused you is deep-rooted and that your brain is trying to remind you of that.

Breakups can be so painful for some people that they keep haunting them for years. Long-term suffering is especially common for dumpees whose dumpers did something nasty to hurt them.

Something like cheat, monkey-branch, manipulate, ghost, and in any manner destroy their self-esteem and deny them closure.

So if you’re dreaming about having sex with your ex and you’d rather not, think about whether your ex still gives you anxiety and if you want your ex back. If you’re hurting and wish to reconcile, chances are that you’re having these ex-dreams because you haven’t fully processed the breakup and would take your ex back if he or she apologized and asked for another chance.

In today’s post, we discuss why you keep dreaming about having sex with your ex. We’ll also talk about how to stop or reduce the number of ex-dreams you experience.

Dreaming about having sex with your ex

If you’re dreaming about having sex with your ex, don’t be too surprised. Ex-dreams of all kinds are extremely common for people who haven’t dealt with their post-breakup emotions yet. They’re especially common for those who depend on their ex for healing or forgiveness and don’t love themselves.

I conducted a survey back in 2020 that revealed most dumpees experienced ex-dreams at some point during their recovery journey. Here are the results of that survey. Feel free to add your vote.

The survey above confirms that dumpees or dumpers who feel strongly about or because of their ex are more likely to dream about their ex than people who have detached and are ready to date someone else.

Emotions in general (but especially unpleasant emotions such as guilt, anxiety, and regret) tend to trigger unwanted ex-dreams the most.

So know that as long as you feel some strong emotion for your ex that you’re prone to dreaming about having sex with your ex. The stronger the breakup makes you feel, the more likely you are to think, obsess, and dream about your ex.

There’s nothing wrong with you if you keep dreaming about a person who has hurt you. You’re just a human being who’s going through a tedious healing process. Once you’ve recovered fully, things will change big time. That’s because one of two things will happen.

You’ll either stop having sexual dreams about your ex or you’ll stop caring about having them.

Either way, you’ll be back to your happy self and possibly with someone else, so you won’t care about your ex or any dreams about him or her.

While you’re healing, though, you should focus on yourself and do what you can to decrease your ex-dreams. The reason you need to decrease them is that they feel very real. And because they feel real, they wound you deeply and make you think about your ex and crave him or her.

Emotional ex-dreams can be very harmful to you, depending on how long it’s been since the breakup or rather, how much of the breakup you’ve processed. If you think about your ex once in blue moon, a dream every so often won’t affect you much or at all.

You’ll probably forget that you even had it at the end of the day if not sooner.

But if you’re still in the early stages of a breakup for the dumpee and can’t handle things that give you hope or take hope away, ex-dreams will set you back big time. They’ll make you want to be with your ex or trigger your biggest regrets.

With that said, here’s why you can’t stop dreaming about having sex with your ex.

There’s a lot you can do to stop having sexual dreams or any ex-dreams you may be having. But you must know what that is so you can avoid mistakes and start doing the right things.

How to stop dreaming about having sex with your ex?

The most important thing to do when you dream about sleeping with your ex is to not think about it. Instead of trying to remember everything that happened from start to finish, divert your attention to something else.

Think about your hobbies, friends, and responsibilities for that day and keep your brain engaged. This way, you’ll refuse to give your dreams importance and allow yourself to forget about them in a day or sooner.

People often make the mistake of thinking about their dreams or nightmares and analyzing them. They think that dreams carry some secret message from the universe and that they must decipher them to get the most out of them. In reality, all thinking about their ex-dreams does is that it makes people obsessed with their ex.

And obsession increases the frequency of similar dreams and delays recovery.

So first things first, whenever you wake up after dreaming about your ex, tell yourself that dreams are common and that there’s no point in analyzing them. Immediately after that, find something more important to think about and plan and focus on it for a few minutes or as long as it takes to avoid thinking about the dream.

This is how you can slowly forget about the dream and go back to sleep if you still have time to rest.

Another (longer) way to stop dreaming about having sex with your ex is to acknowledge that you may not be over your ex or the traumatic experience (the breakup). Tell yourself that it’s normal to dream about an ex who has broken your heart into pieces and left you to deal with your inner demons alone.

Talking to yourself in this kind of self-soothing manner is vital for your healing. So convince yourself that there’s nothing wrong with thinking about your ex, but that deliberately recalling certain events puts you into overdrive mode and hinders your healing as well as growth.

To stop dreaming about having sex with your ex, you’ll essentially have to control your thoughts and strive for emotional independence. This means you’ll have to work on getting over your ex and falling back in love with yourself.

It will probably take you a while to do that because breakups take time to get over, but once you manage to disconnect from your ex emotionally, you’ll see that ex-dreams don’t bother you anymore and that they have no secret meaning.

They’re just dreams that occur because you used to have a strong bond with your ex.

If you can’t stop dreaming about your ex after half a year or more (and it’s bothering you), you should consider consulting a dream expert and/or a mental health expert. He or she may be able to assist you better in this regard than I can.

If dreams don’t bother you, however, then you should just ignore them. They’ll go away or occur extremely infrequently if you pay no attention to them. The key to stopping them is not to reject them and be okay with having them. It’s the same with everything unpleasant in life.

The sooner you come to terms with something unwanted, the less often you’ll experience it and/or the less you’ll care about it. The problem people have with things that bother them is that they focus on them so hard it bothers them even more.

They become angry or resentful and as a result, ponder about them even more. That’s not going to make the dreams go away. If anything, it’s going to cause you to experience them more frequently and force you to keep reacting to them rather than ignoring them.

So do your best to accept them as a part of your healing process and ignore them afterward. You’ll see that life gets easier when you stop trying to control things or people directly by sheer force. Some things you don’t have the ability to control.

All you can do is accept them and get them out of your head with disinterest and self-prioritization.

Is my ex dreaming about having sex with me too?

Have you ever wondered if your friends and family members dream about you too? And have you wondered what triggered you to have those dreams?

You probably have, but you may not remember it. Some kind of recent interaction with them likely caused you to dream about your friends or family members. Something like a meetup or some fun or stressful event.

Whatever the cause may be, your friends and others dream about you too from time to time. It may not be very often, but depending on their relationship with you, they certainly have dreams in which they interact with you.

Scientists say we have 4 to 6 dreams per night on average. Most of them we don’t remember, but that gives us plenty of chances to think about other people.

It’s no different with your ex. Your ex also dreams about you once in a while. But if your ex is the dumper, it’s extremely unlikely that your ex dreams about you as frequently as you dream about him or her. You have to remember that dumpers are detached (void of negative emotions) and tend to feel relieved.

And relief doesn’t make dumpers very nostalgic, anxious, sad, or depressed. At least not for a couple of months.

Dumpers tend to dream about dumpees months and months after the breakup when they’ve stopped feeling relieved and elated and started to experience guilt or problems in their life.

That’s when they start thinking about their ex and also dreaming about him or her.

You shouldn’t expect the dumper to have sexual dreams about you after the breakup. Of course, it could happen if your ex was forced to dump you and still has feelings for you, but that’s very rare.

Dumpers’ remorse tends to set in months later when something unpleasant happens to dumpers because that’s when dumpers finally feel pain and wonder about how to stop the pain.

So keep in mind that people dream about their exes the most when they’re in some kind of trouble and need help. They tend not to don’t indulge in recollection of past events and dream about their ex for no reason just because dumpees are dreaming about them.

I hope this article has taught you why you keep dreaming about having sex with your ex. If it did, let us know what you liked about it. And if it didn’t, post your questions and thoughts in the comments section below. We’ll get back to you soon.

And lastly, if you prefer to talk about your dreams with us alone, sign up for 1-on-1 breakup coaching here.