dreaming of my ex-boyfriend...still..?

[lovealways31408]

so, i think before i talk about the dreams, i should give a little background on my ex and i. i'm sorry if this is so long.. basically, we had an on again/off again relationship for almost 3 years. we first dated freshman year, but that was the end of the good times for the most part. more than once, he'd be telling me he loved me, and then i'd find out he was dating a new girl, who he always lied about. the first time, we were sophomores and he'd been dating some girl for almost a month WHILE talking to me and feeding me all kinds of bullshit, and i had to find out from other people. we stopped talking, then i stupidly let him back into my life again. then the whole process literally repeated my junior year, until he cheated on the girl with me, broke up with her for me, then broke up with me for her. when they broke up for good, he started talking to me again and i, like an idiot, let him back in. he kissed me, and then days later i found out he'd been hanging out with the first girl who got into the middle of our relationship. that was in the first couple days of september. we haven't spoken since. when he broke up with me my junior year, i was beyond depressed. i really do love him more than anything in this world, regardless of everything that's gone on. i dreamt of him every single night that first week after we broke up, and in every dream, he would tell me he didn't love me anymore and to just leave him alone. this time around, i'm sad, but the dreams held off. until one night..here's the dream: for some reason, i was lying down on the ground outside of a football stadium? and then i saw him walk up with the girl i heard he'd been hanging out with. they saw me, but instead of him being mean, he let her walk in the gate, then held the gate open for me, with an almost sad look in his eye. i screamed something profane at him, and instead of walking away, he came right to me. the only thing he kept saying was my full name (something NOBODY ever calls me besides him). he kept reaching out to touch me but i just kept yelling at him, crying and pushing him away. he kept following me until he finally gave up and walked into the stadium. exhausted from crying, i walked to my car and fell asleep inside. i woke up at like 3 in the morning, running to the stadium in hopes of finding him there, not realizing everyone had left. i went home and fell asleep in some random room that isn't even my house, and when i woke up, he was asleep in my parent's bed. i went to sit in the foyer and he walked out of my parent's bedroom, trying to strike up conversation, getting ready to leave but never leaving.. then i woke up from the dream. i've been dreaming about him more often now, like 3-4 times a week even. they're mainly all good dreams, with him trying to apologize and get me to at least talk to him. i just don't understand it. this is the longest we've gone without talking since the day we met. what does this mean, other than the fact that i'm obviously still in love with him?

[Burned up]

Sounds like a real emotional tangle you've found yourself in there. Head says one thing, heart says another. Fantasy says one thing, reality says another. You say you're in love with him. I challenge that. I say you need love so much that you idealise him, hoping that you are the most special and most important person in his life perhaps to the exclusion of anyone else. When (like in the dream as well as reality) another person appears it's just too much. In reality you cope the best you can. In the dream your defenses are down and you let out your anger and tears big time. One piece of symbolism that caught my attention was when you found him in your parents' bed. Some say (and I think I agree) that the "love feeling" is a blissful feeling we had in infancy when we were the object of our parents' attention. As we get older, we find that our parents have other people and other interests in life and through these mini-traumas we become stronger and can cope on our own. Then older still, we find ourselves attracted to another person because they re-invoke that blissful love feeling. In your dream, I wonder if the bed scene was somehow tapping into that? Also our parents give us our values and it could be that he is challenging these, resulting in you taking on values which are different from those you grew up with. Love dreams can be powerful and painful, but they also remind us of our capacity to fall in love. I don't know if you're implicitly asking about what to do in real life here, but if you are then I would say that the current state of affairs will only bring you much sadness, as you probably can guess. He will never be your fantasy lover because he is a real person with a real life that isn't moulded to your life. On the other hand, if you can build up some "ego strength" and hold yourself together so you are the same healthily functioning person when you're with him and when you're apart from him then you'll be able to make judgements based on reality rather than fantasy. The compulsive nature of your relationship with him at the moment is always going to bring about the emotions in your dream, whether you suppress them in real life nor not.

[QuietWhun]

I like what Burned Up interpreted about your dream. I would also like to add, and even question towards Burned UP. Is it possible for those types of dreams to come up when there wasn't any closure in the relationship? The reason I ask that is because I have experienced similar dreams about my ex in the past. Which left a similar unhappy feeling. Until I some how created this one last confrontation in a dream, that gave me the closure I've been looking for. The dreams have stopped since. Its possible you have not let go of these feelings, which keep showing up within a dream when your sub conscious mind is running loose. You can try what I did in the past. I would keep track of these dreams and look for symbols. This is what lead me to believe I kept having these types of dreams, since I never got the closure I wanted.

[Burned up]

@QuietWhun I don't know for sure. Although having read your piece, I can see where you're coming from. You have done well to use your dreams for closure. I have read about such things but haven't managed to achieve objectives like that in my dreams ever. When I was in a state like you described (different circumstances, same feeling) I had two consecutive dreams of a strange girl who I felt very close to. And I mean a child kind of girl. "She" became a great comfort to me in my waking life, a kind of angel and inner child (which was odd, me being male) at the same time. Whatever my unconscious mind was doing, it was very effective and also very challenging. This was a kind of reverse of your situation, where I got some sort of unexpected closure by taking my dream to waking life rather than the other way round. I think our experiences show how powerful our unconscious mind is and how close our dreaming really is to waking reality.