Why Do I Dream About My Ex Years Later?

Dreaming about your ex years later is not uncommon. As a matter of fact, most people dream about their ex-partner every now and then—whether it’s been 5 months or 5 years after the breakup.

So if you’re having an ex-dream once in blue moon, it’s perfectly normal.

That’s because you and your ex once lived a joint life and spent a great portion of your time together. The two of you bonded on a deep level and likely shared a strong emotional connection—one that only romantic partners can experience.

As a couple, you’ve gotten so used to having each other in your daily lives that your very existences intertwined. Both of you naturally got attached to each other and developed powerful feelings of love.

But here comes the hard part.

Some people, unfortunately, can’t let go of their past relationship no matter how hard they try. They instead reflect, grieve and dream about their ex even years later.

Some people deliberately keep their ex on their conscious mind by refusing to follow the indefinite no contact rule and other self-imposed rules that allow them to move on. Those are the people who usually prolong their recovery and dream about their ex nearly every night.

As for the people who diligently work on leaving their ex behind, they normally reduce the number of ex-dreams and soften the impact that negative dreams have on their well-being. They do so because they choose to fight for themselves and their recovery.

So if you’re experiencing recurring dreams about your ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend or you can’t stop dreaming about your ex’s new partner, this is the article for you.

Why do I dream about my ex years later?

If you often dream about your ex, the most reasonable explanation is that you are still aching over the loss of your romantic relationship. Assuming that you’re the dumpee (the person who got dumped), the termination of your romantic relationship likely felt as if you were going to die.

The pain your ex made you feel wounded you extremely. It left deep scars throughout your body and caused such mental anguish that your mind found it hard to just forget about it and pretend it never happened.

Due to the pain you’ve endured—your brain, therefore, finds it difficult to overlook the shortage of happy hormones that the breakup has caused.

To the brain, the loss of your partner felt like the worst case of drug addiction—hence why you probably experienced drug-like withdrawal symptoms.

Although these symptoms are of emotional nature, they quickly turned into physical pain—affecting your whole body.

As a result of physical pain, the separation immediately created a big fear of loss and a fear of pain—which made you reflect on your relationship whether you wanted to or not.

So even if you’re no longer thinking about your ex, he or she has inflicted enough damage to affect your subconscious mind. Since your ex hurt you badly, he or she is still alive in your head as a reminder to prevent your past from repeating itself.

That’s why you shouldn’t be concerned if you dream about your ex every now and then months or years after the breakup. Not as long as it doesn’t hurt you.

Instead, just remember that your brain is latching onto the emotional connection that you and your ex once had. This includes both the good and the bad times.

How to stop dreaming about my ex?

The bad thing about dreaming is that you can’t force your ex out of your head no matter how much you hate dreaming about your ex.

As a matter of fact, you will probably dream more about your ex if you think about him or her and ponder about the good times. That’s why the more nostalgic and sentimental you are about your ex, the more nostalgic emotions you will create and the more frequent your dreams will be.

So if deliberate thinking stimulates your brain to dream about your ex months or even years later, not thinking about your ex achieves exactly the opposite.

If you’re wondering how to stop dreaming about your ex’ here’s what you can do.

Whenever you think about your ex, immediately discard the thought and supply no emotion to it. Just let it go.

I know it may be easier said than done, but trust me. It’s not impossible. What you have to do is start practicing self-awareness and working on developing the willpower to overcome your emotional problems.

You can stop dreaming about your ex!

Some people honestly believe that their emotions are impossible to change and control—so they just accept their rampaging impulses. Those are usually the people who haven’t exercised their mind enough and instead let their emotions make the decisions for them.

If this is your mentality, then yes—it’s impossible to change the way you feel about your ex and the dreams you manifest.

Whenever you cry, get anxious or feel angry because of your dreams, you give your dreams exactly what makes them recur.

In other words, you tell the dreams, “Thank you. Here’s my devotion so feel free to come again.“

It cannot be otherwise because as long as you supply emotions to your dreams, you give them the energy to return.

The trick to quitting dreaming about your ex is therefore in letting go.

You can do this by telling yourself (and believing it too) the following lines:

• It was just a dream.
• We broke up many years ago. I’ll just go back to sleep.
• I’m thinking about my ex all of a sudden. I have better things to think about.
• The dream doesn’t mean anything.
• I don’t care

So once again, the key is in brushing off your thoughts and negative emotions and in providing no significance to anything related to your ex.

With a little bit of practice and by leaving your ex in the past, you can greatly reduce the number of dreams and nightmares of your ex.

But it all starts with you and your willingness to fight your demons.

Why should you stop dreaming about your ex?

You’ve already noticed that some dreams are completely random and have no connection to the real world.

Your ex-dreams on the other hand, can seem very real and probably hurt, annoy, prolong your detachment, and extract other unpleasant feelings from you.

There are many types of dreams.

You can have happy, sad, nostalgic, sexual, and even seeing your ex with someone else kind of dreams. There’s truly no end to everything you can dream about when it comes to ex-partners.

And since dreaming about your ex probably hurts you and ruins your whole day, it might be in your best interest to stop dreaming about your ex or at least try to lower the frequency.

You really have nothing to lose by trying.

So if you’re still wondering why you shouldn’t dream about your ex, here’s an infographic explaining the reasons in more detail.

The moment you wake up from an ex-dream, you immediately become sentimental. Even if you’re the dumper, you could feel as if you’ve made a big mistake for letting your ex go.

Either way, recurring dreams about your ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend could feel so real, they end up playing with your emotions and make you unbelievably nostalgic.

And this is extremely dangerous for your emotional well-being.

What does it mean if you dream about your ex?

Depending on how detached you are from your ex, dreaming about your ex could mean a lot or absolutely nothing.

If you’re heartbroken and constantly think about your ex, then you’re compulsively feeding your ex-obsession. That’s because your thoughts encourage your mind to contemplate about your ex and keep him or her alive for as long as possible.

By thinking of the worst possible scenarios, you regularly (with despondent emotions) push your ex into your subconscious mind. And as you may already know, the longer this goes on for and the more attention you give to your ex, the more hurt you get.

According to HuffPost, we experience fear dreams when we feel vulnerable and afraid of something or someone hurting our emotional and physical well-being.

Fear dreams can be anything from wars and natural disasters to fear of spiders and ex-partners.

But the truth is that everyone is afraid of something. Most people just don’t think about it.

So if you keep waking up in the night whenever you dream about your ex, here’s what your dreams could mean.

When your ex is on your mind 24/7 from the moment you wake up to the minute you fall asleep, it’s not really surprising if you dream about your ex as well.

The bad thing about it is that as long as you are still struggling with the breakup, these dreams will keep recurring.

I dream about my ex every night! What does it mean?

If you dream about your ex every night and you think that you’re connected to your ex on some supernatural level, that’s probably not the case.

It’s likely got nothing to do with your ex thinking about you, looking at your photos and conversations, or regretting his or her decision.

As we’ve mentioned before, your dreams about your ex are indicators that something is going on with you internally.

This implies that something is provoking your unpleasant dreams—and that something is most likely your ex.

So as long as your brain is negatively affected and you’re in love with your ex, you have a high chance of dreaming about an ex from the past.

A good example of this thesis is when you watch a horror movie, go to bed shortly after, and have nightmares as a result.

This occurs because some regions of your brain are still highly stimulated.

And the same ideology applies to your ex-dreams.

If you think about your ex in a bittersweet fashion—you will likely dream about your ex.

Conversely, if you think happy thoughts and feel excited to be alive, you will mostly have happy dreams.

I’m over the breakup and I still dream about my ex

If you’re over your ex and you no longer care what your ex does or who he or she is with, then that’s a whole different story.

It likely has nothing to do with your ex, but everything with your current emotional state.

So whenever you feel negative emotions—your mind often jumps back in time and tries to solve your current emotional distress.

That means if you’ve been feeling down, sad, depressed or anything negative recently, you are that much more likely to experience recurring dreams about your ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend.

Scientists say that people have on average about 5-7 dreams per night so the odds of you dreaming about your ex are not very low.

Most of the time, if the dreams are insignificant, we quickly forget about the dreams in just a few minutes. But when we dream about our dumper ex, the dream emotionally disturbs us to the point where we are that much more likely to remember it.

Nightmares especially wake us up very often and instantly demand from us that we think about them.

Does my ex dream about me?

If your ex is the dumper, it’s crucial to understand that your ex is not grieving over the end of the relationship—hence why he or she isn’t dreaming about you.

Your ex just isn’t as emotionally distressed as you, so the probability of your ex dreaming about you is significantly lower.

If your ex does dream about you though, it either happens for no reason whatsoever or because something bad has happened to your ex.

So if you were wondering if people dream about their ex-partners, you now have the answer. It all depends on what they are feeling within and toward themselves.

Since dumpees’ mental state is usually weakened, they are that much more likely to dream about their ex-partners.

Dumpers, on the other hand, are no robots. They can also get hurt after some time has gone by since the breakup. But for them to dream about their ex-partner, they have to first process the relief and elation from the breakup.

This usually occurs months later (unless they are regretful of their decision sooner).

Moreover, if their self-esteem is low or they’re hurting from a recently failed relationship, then dumpers will miss their ex much quicker.

They will become nostalgic and possibly even dream about their dumpees.

Here’s when your ex (dumper) could dream about you compared to you as a dumpee.

Seeing your ex with someone else in a dream

If you’re dreaming about your ex and his or her new partner, then chances are you still care about your ex and hate seeing him or her with someone else.

Since you despise that idea so much you probably dream about your ex hugging, kissing, and doing various romantic things with another person

Everything your ex did with you, he or she likely does with a third party—and the thought of that bothers you a lot. In fact, it probably disturbs you so much, your fears manifest in the form of a dream.

You basically dream about what you want to dream about the least. So if you think about it in an optimistic way, your brain only wants you to overcome your fears – to accept your ex’s new partner (if there is a new person) and move on properly.

To stop obsessing over your ex’s new partner, you should practice acceptance and forgiveness. You must work on becoming “okay” with your ex’s dating decision and explain to yourself that it’s no longer your concern.

Don’t just tell yourself you don’t care, but feel it too! Emotions are what drive you to obsess over your ex and dream about him or her. So focus on letting go.

Once you understand that dreams about your ex’s new partner are your own manifestation because of what you feel, you will be able to better control your dreams—which are your fears.

Although they may not disappear the moment you start working on your inner peace, they will, however, become a lot easier to deal with.

That’s because you just won’t care enough to get hurt by them.

Are you dreaming about your ex nearly every day? Has it been months or years since your breakup? Comment below.

Zan

My name is Zan and I’m the founder of Magnet of Success. I enjoy writing realistic relationship and breakup articles and helping readers heal and grow. With more than 5 years of experience in the self-improvement, relationship, and breakup sphere, my goal is to provide advice that fosters positivity and success and avoids preventable mistakes and pain. Buy me a coffee, learn more about me, or get in touch today.