Guide Dreaming about your ex: what it means, and what it does not

You woke up with their face still in the room and you want to know what it means. Dreaming about your ex is almost always about you: something unfinished, a grief the day had no room for, a version of yourself you were when you were with them. It is not a message from them, and it does not mean they are thinking of you. What it does mean is worth twenty minutes of your morning, and I will show you how to spend them.

People bring me their dreams in the first line of a message, before the question. I dreamed about him again last night, and I need to know. I am not a dream reader and I do not sell dream readings. But the readings I wrote this autumn started with a dream more often than not, and the same handful come up again and again. So this is what I have learned to say back.

Why am I dreaming about my ex again?

Because the mind does at night what the day would not let it do. Four reasons cover nearly every ex dream I am told about: a loose end, a grief that got no room, a time of your life they stand for, and a shared calendar. Only the first one asks anything of you. The other three ask you to notice, and then to sleep.

A loose end. The conversation you never had. The apology owed in one direction or the other. An ending that came by text and never got its last scene. Dreams go looking for endings the way a tongue goes looking for the gap where a tooth was.

Grief with no room. You were fine all day. You were busy on purpose. Grief waits for the one hour when nothing else is on, and that hour is three in the morning.

A time, not a person. The year you were twenty three. The flat with the bad radiator. Who you were before the job. The ex in the dream is a doorway, and the dream is about the room behind them.

The calendar. The month you met. Their birthday, three days off. The song in the shop. And, for three weeks a year, the retrograde, when half my inbox dreams about the same person on the same night.

And the plain one, which I will not pretend away: sometimes you dream about them because you miss them. That is allowed. It is also not news, and it is not a plan.

Dreaming about your ex: the common dreams and what sits under them

Not a dictionary. These are the dreams people describe to me most, and what I have found underneath when we talk them through. If you woke up sad, the dream showed you what you want. If you woke up relieved, it showed you what you have. Both are useful. Neither is instructions.

The one I am asked about most is the second one, the dream where they walk past. People wake from it certain they have been forgotten. In the readings I write for that dream, the card that lands most is the Four of Cups, which is someone not looking, and not looking is a long way from forgetting.

Is dreaming about your ex a sign they are thinking about you?

No. A dream is yours. It is made of your memory, your day and your fear, and it happens inside your head with nobody else in the room. There is no way, from a dream, to know what another person was doing at that hour, and I will not pretend to one, however much you would like me to.

Here is the thing I have noticed, and I say it carefully. The dream often arrives a few days before the message does. People take that as proof of a thread between them. I take it as calendars. You both hit the same anniversary. You both walked past the same bar. You are both inside the same three weeks of the year when everybody looks backwards. The dream and the text have the same cause, and the cause is the month, not a signal sent across town at night.

If you want to know whether they are actually thinking about you, look at what they do when they are awake and nobody is making them. Those signs, and the ones that only look like signs, are in will my ex come back, and none of them happen while you are asleep.

Does dreaming about an ex mean someone put a spell on you?

Almost never, and I would rather lose the sale than tell you otherwise. An ex dream is the most ordinary dream there is. A person you spent years beside does not need a candle to get into your sleep; they are in the furniture. When someone writes to me convinced that the dreams are a working, I look, and what I find is nearly always an anniversary, a bad month, or a message they received three days before the first dream and did not connect.

What a working on you actually looks like is a different list, and it happens in daylight: luck turning in one direction only, a run of things breaking, a pull toward a person you have no history with. I wrote it out in signs someone put a spell on you, and most of it is about ruling things out. Dreaming of someone you loved is not on that list, and nobody should charge you to remove it.

How to do the three-line morning page and a three card pull

This is what I would hand a friend who woke up from one of these. It takes twenty minutes, before the phone, and it is the single most useful thing you can do with a dream other than forget it.

What you need

• A notebook and a pen, kept by the bed from tonight. Paper, because the phone has their name in it.
• Three days of leaving the phone alone where they are concerned. Mute them for exactly that long.
• A deck you know, for the second part. Any standard deck you have shuffled before.
• A glass of water by the bed. Old practice, cheap, and it works on the waking up.

1. Write the three lines before you stand up

Line one: what happened in the dream, in a sentence. Line two: how you felt when you woke, in a word. Line three: one thing in your actual week that matches it. The third line is the useful one. Most dreams are explained by it, and most people never write it.

2. Say the unsaid thing to the kitchen

If the dream was a conversation, have it, out loud, to nobody, once, in full. Whatever you did not say to them, say it to the sink. It sounds foolish and it works, because dreams repeat what has not been said and stop when it has.

3. Wait three days before any message

Decided in daylight on the fourth day, a plain line is a choice. Sent at six in the morning with the dream still on you, it is the dream texting. If after three days you still want to send one line, send one, and live with it going unanswered.

4. If it keeps coming, pull three cards

Not on the dream. On the question under it, written with their first name: what is unfinished between me and Sam, what is it asking of me, and what closes it? Left to right, those are the three cards. Read the middle one hardest. It is the only one with a job in it for you.

5. Write what you saw, then put the deck away

Write the cards down before you look anything up. Then do not pull again on the same dream, tonight or tomorrow. If the dream and the cards keep pointing at the same thing, that is your answer, and the sections below say what to do with it.

What the cards show when I read the question under a dream

The dream nearly always sends one of three questions to my table: is it finished, is there anything still there, or what am I not seeing. The cards answer those plainly, and they answer them in daylight, which is more than the dream can do.

For is it finished, the cards I see most at my altar are the Six of Cups, which is memory and not movement, and the Eight of Cups, which is you walking away whole with the dream still following. When the Judgement card lands here, I write that something is asking to be finished out loud, and I ask whether there is a conversation you owe or are owed.

For is there anything there, the Moon shows up more for dream questions than for any other kind, and I read it as the dream itself: a thing seen by reflected light, real and not reliable. The Knight of Cups beside it is a message on its way, and I say so. The Lovers reversed is a bond you keep returning to in sleep because you have not chosen against it awake.

For what am I not seeing, the Four of Swords is rest you have not taken, and the Five of Cups is grief you have not drunk. Neither is about them. Both are about why the dream keeps the night shift.

When dreaming about your ex every night is a loose end, not a message

One dream is a night. The same dream, every week, for two months, is a loose end, and loose ends do not tie themselves. That is the point at which I would stop treating it as weather and do something, because by then it has usually started running your days: the page checked in the morning, the date canceled, the signs read into everything.

The dreams described to me this autumn were mostly the same-fight dream, and the people having it had all done the same thing: stopped talking about the ending to anyone, months ago, because it was boring their friends. The dream picked up the shift. If that is you, the kitchen exercise above is where to start, and if the kitchen is not enough, a cord cutting is the working. It does not harm them and it does not close any door they might one day open. It cuts the pull on your side, and in what I have seen the dreams thin out inside a lunar cycle. People write a month later surprised that they slept through.

The mistakes that keep the dream coming back

• Texting from inside it. The dream decides, the thumb obeys, the morning regrets. Three days, every time.
• Reading it as news about them. Every dream turned into a report on their feelings is a dream you will have again, because the real question went unanswered.
• Telling nobody. Dreams repeat what has not been said. Say it, to a friend or to the sink.
• Looking at their page the morning after. The dream opened a door and you walked through it awake. Now you have two loose ends.
• Shopping for a dream dictionary. The meaning is in your week, not in a book. Line three of the morning page will tell you more than any symbol list.
• Casting to make it stop while still hoping it means something. The two pull against each other. Decide which one you want first.

When a dream is not the thing to read

When it has stopped being a dream and started being a plan. If the dream is the reason you are thinking of reaching out, the dream is not the thing to read; the situation is. Ask, in daylight, with the dream left out, whether anything has changed since it ended. That is the question in should I get back with my ex, and it has an answer the dream never will.

If you decide to reach out, decide it on the fourth day, and if you want the channel opened rather than scripted, a contact me spell is the narrow working for it. If they asked to be left alone, the dream does not change that, and I will not cast toward someone who said no. If what you want is for the nights to be yours again, that is the cord cutting above, and it is the kinder tool more often than people expect.

What I will not do with a dream is tell you it means they are coming back, or that they are with someone, or sell you a reading of the dream itself. The dream is not the question. The question is underneath it, and that one I can read.

When I read it for you

Send one real question, the first names involved, and what you actually want to know. Leave the dream in, if you like; I read around it. I do not work from birth dates or charts, and you can tell me the rest or not, as you like. Order before 6 pm ET and the reading is written the same day, to your email.

What comes back is the cards in the order they land, what each one shows for the question under the dream, the parts I cannot place said as such, and what to do this week. If the cards say it is finished, I write that it is finished, and then what they show instead.

• Standard is about 900 words on the question you send.
• In Depth is about 2000 words and takes in the people around it, not only the one in the dream. For when you have been carrying this for months and it has stopped being a single question.

Reply with questions and I answer them. If nothing comes through, I say so rather than fill the gap.

Ask your question, or read about the reading first.

Paying someone to read it? Read how to tell a real spell caster from a scam and what spell casting costs first.