Science Explains Why You Dream About Your Ex

Have you ever had dreams about a former partner? Perhaps even uncomfortable ones that you can't quite seem to shake, regardless of how you actually get along with them in the waking world? Don't worry, science says that it's surprisingly common — and as it turns out, you're far from the only one to have these kinds of dreams. According to studies on the subject, up to 8% of all dreams can be about exes, and researchers think that such dreams are the brain's way to reflect on a relationship that at least used to be important.

As you may know from personal experience, dreams about your exes aren't always hostile ones that reflect breaking up and the less-than-pleasant emotions involved in it. While one 2021 study in Clocks & Sleep found that people who have dreams about former partners tend to associate negative emotions with them in said dreams, it also discovered that dreaming about your ex involves more positive feelings than dreams about your current partner. In other words, it's an emotional tumult that can get quite intense, to the point that 25% of people have even had sex dreams about their former lovers. 

Studies about sleep can be about its practical recovery aspects, such as how much sleep we really need. However, science has also been interested in dreaming, and researchers have suspected for a while that dreams are doing a lot more than just entertaining your sleeping brain. In fact, dreaming could be a way for our brains to process the information that we get during our waking hours, and this could manifest in some seriously surprising ways. For instance, one study has found that nightmares can predict a real-life illness. 

The continuity hypothesis of dreaming proposes that dreams are inherently connected to our waking life and effectively an extension of the experiences we've had. What's more, there's also a chance that vivid dreams actually help us rest better, which suggests it might not be unreasonable to assume that our brain welcomes immersive memories to dream about ... and what's more vivid than the complex emotions and memories tangled around a past love? Put all this together, and dreaming about former partners makes a surprising amount of sense.