Last night I unexpectedly found myself in the company of my ex. Unexpected because, following a particularly protracted break-up, I’d asserted several months ago that I wanted no further contact with her. It seems that my subconscious had other ideas, though, and hooked us up again in a dream of such realism it left me feeling as angry and duped as I did when the relationship fell apart, not to mention in doubt about the extent of my recovery and guiltily unfaithful in respect of my new partner.
In this dream, my ex and I were holding hands over a candle-lit table, quite your regular Bogart and Bergman (or, in this case, Bergman and Bergman), familiar and loving.
This was what felt right — our being together was the reality and all the trauma of our break-up had been one long, unbelievable dream. Like Dallas’s Pamela Ewing opening the shower door and finding Bobby resurrected after two series in the grave. Then my ex, looking into my eyes and smiling as if what she was about to say was a special intimacy lovers should share, started telling me how in love she was with a new partner. And how glad she was that we’d split up because, of course, I knew that she’d never loved me, and wasn’t it great that we were still friends, and wasn’t I thrilled for her?
Oddly enough, it wasn’t a surge of joy I felt, but a raw rage that woke me in a sweat. I got none of the relief that should come with knowing a nightmare has all just been a dream, especially as I realised it presented a whole new set of negative emotions for me to deal with.
Not only did the intensity of my anger make me think I’d been fooling myself for the past year, it was also as though I’d betrayed my new partner, making a sham of the trust we’d built by falling so easily back into the intimacy of my past.
It didn’t matter that none of this took place in the real world. I could not deny the potency of my feelings and, much as I knew the dream did not reflect my current reality, it ate away at me like the guilt of a misjudged affair. And, in the same way that an adulterer misguidedly believes that ‘fessing up will assuage their feelings of guilt, I felt compelled to reveal the details of my dream. So, two years after it had ended, this destructive relationship had crawled back into my bed through the medium of the subconscious and hurt me — and someone I cared for — all over again. My biggest frustration was figuring out why.
Where had it come from, when I’d long discharged myself from relationship-addiction clinic, having been free for a good year of those rogue scents and sights and sounds that bring it all flooding back?
Then I clocked the date — it was two years to the week since the end of the affair. That involuntary close encounter was apparently some sort of subconscious anniversary present to self. As unwanted gifts go, it topped the ”return for a refund” list.
A few days after the dream, a strange thing happened. That same ex — who had accepted my drama-queeny demand that she never contact me — broke the rules and texted me, ”to see how I was as I’d popped into her head a few times recently”.
Coincidence? Or does the cycle of a break-up continue to be a shared experience, even for the long-estranged? I almost picked up the phone to ask if she’d had a dream. — Â