stop dreaming my husband has not left me

Hi, My husband left me a few weeks ago and I keep dreaming that he has not left me, or that he comes back to me and apologises for all the pain he has caused me. These dreams are causing me great distress as I wake it feels like it's happening all over again as I have to remind myself it's not true. How can I make my dreaming self know what my waking self knows? Can I dream that I am feeling ok about him leaving me and just dream about the bad things about him, so I wake up glad he's gone?

Does anyone have any tips on this?

Use it as a dreamsign.

Exactly what I was going to say, tell yourself that if you're in that situation again you know it's a dream and then you can become lucid.

What you're going to want to start doing is reality checking every single time you:

think of your husband
think of your husband leaving you
think of this dreams you're having about your husband
think of divorce, separation, relationships

Basically, anything and everything that is somehow related to this concept of your husband leaving you. If there's a certain location where these dreams keep taking place, reality check every time you see it or think about it.

If you keep this up, eventually when you have this dream your first instinct will be to reality check, allowing you to become lucid. You didn't offer a lot of details about the dream, but from this point you will be able to change your behavior in the dream, interact with your husband and other things in the dream, and hopefully this will allow you to reach some sort of closure that will end the dreams.

I also highly recommend reading about dream stabilization and dream control (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) so that when you become lucid you are ready.

Thanks so much to you and the other 2 responses. Basically I need to recognise I'm dreaming, which I will do by initially reality checking all my thoughts about my situation when I am awake. So I can eventually recognise when its a dream, and ultimately reworking the dream to allow myself to stop the dream becoming a fantasy that ultimately hurts me more, and direct it to a become a healing and empowering dream. Yes, it makes sense and I'm very grateful.

Awesome, glad we explained it well! Good luck, and make sure to let us know how it goes, if you need more help or if you're successful :)

What's strange is that although I am taking the preparatory steps, reality checks and preparing to remember the dreams, since I wrote the posting I haven't had the dream again, but am on the alert, so if it starts coming back I will get in touch, thanks for answering.

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Originally Posted by sooze

Hi, My husband left me a few weeks ago and I keep dreaming that he has not left me, or that he comes back to me and apologises for all the pain he has caused me. These dreams are causing me great distress as I wake it feels like it's happening all over again as I have to remind myself it's not true. How can I make my dreaming self know what my waking self knows? Can I dream that I am feeling ok about him leaving me and just dream about the bad things about him, so I wake up glad he's gone?

Does anyone have any tips on this?

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So firstly I'd say I'm really sorry about your split.

Yeah, dreams can be a kicker, bringing back old feelings etc.
Even worse when you're still so close the actual event.

I kinda feel that parting with a loved one can be almost as bad as losing them to death. Because effectively you are losing them, its only natural to mourn the loss of the relationship.

But your dreams may be a way in which you to process whats going on.
Maybe you need to roll with it and just get it out of your system as best you can.

Anyhow, I hope you don't mind me diverting from the dream talk. I really do sympathise. I know these kind of things are easy for people to say, but you are going to come out the other end of this.

In the meantime, focusing on Lucid dreaming might be a good way of taking your mind off things.

You are very kind to address the actual misery behind the dreaming problem, it's really tough, and it is a form of bereavement: the loss of a significant relationship, yet there's that horrible sting that the other person chose to remove themselves, which obviously is why my mind wants to tell me that it's not so, I sometimes just still can't take it in. But I'll bear in mind the processing thing, coz at times I want to rush away all the pain and I know I've got to feel most of it. Good luck and thanks!

As bereavement goes, this is the worst kind. I remember thinking it would have been easier on me had she just died... that way I could grieve for someone gone, instead of grieving for a time of my life that had been taken from me at anothers' whim quite beyond my understanding.

Did it get into my dreams? Absolutely. It largely paralleled where I was in real life with it. I spent a couple weeks in deep depression, followed a couple weeks of anger (wouldn't want to repeat the anger dreams!), and as my consciousness and unconsciousness started down the road of acceptance and picking myself up and standing on my own, the dreams followed and became useful and not so unwelcomed.

My saying throughout the whole ordeal was simply this, "Sometimes you just gotta howl at the moon". You go through it all with the firm knowledge that you will be OK, and the acceptance that you're not OK right now, but it's OK to not be OK. You'll get there.

This has sold nearly 1,000,000 copies and is frequently recommended.

Rebuilding: When Your Relationship Ends, 3rd Edition by Bruce Fisher

yeah what shift said, hes an expert at lucid dreaming.
check out his DILD program.

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Originally Posted by coolu13

yeah what shift said, hes an expert at lucid dreaming.
check out his DILD program.

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She's an expert.