I dreamt about my ex and then watched our sex tape. Is this bad?
With advice from Jane Eyre, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Science of Storytelling
Content warning: NSFW/ sexual themes. Continue at your own discretion!
Dear Emma,
I recently got into a new relationship with someone I really like. The last few days, however, I’ve thought and dreamt a lot about my ex. I woke up today feeling really horny for them so dug out an old sex tape of ours and masturbated over it. Is this bad?
Wow, so much to unpack here, and I’m excited for this more CosmoGirl-esque addition to the annals of Fictional Therapy - though as stated above, if this week feels a bit raunchy for you, then I won’t be offended if you skip it.
Firstly, no. Nothing you have told me is ‘bad’ or wrong or weird. Dreaming about your ex, feeling horny for your ex, masturbating about your ex - all these things are totally normal. (If you think I’m just being nice, a quick Google search will take you to half a dozen online surveys that corroborate this.) I can understand why you might feel as if you’ve somehow dishonoured your new relationship by dreaming about the past, but I really don’t think you have. The fact is, a long life filled with multiple meaningful partnerships means moments of nostalgia and reminiscence are inevitable. And no-one should be punished for the contents of their imagination or subconscious: for one thing, this would mean the end of literature (or at least the end of good literature). In the words of Claire Dederer, whose book I am currently reading: ‘Thoughts are not deeds. Stories are not crimes.’
But perhaps you didn’t mean ethically ‘bad’. Perhaps you were wondering whether this is a bad sign; whether dreaming about your ex at the dawn of a new relationship is your brain telling you that this new partner is not the one. In which case, I suppose the question is: how much - if any - significance should you ascribe to the workings of your unconscious mind?
Literature is full of significant dreams. In fact, based on a survey of classic books, you’d be forgiven for thinking that by paying close enough attention to your dreams you could understand the truest workings of your own psyche and literally predict your own future. In Charlotte Bronte’s gothic novel Jane Eyre, the titular Jane is also plagued by dreams at the start of a new relationship: two nights before marrying Rochester, she dreams his manor, Thornfield Hall, has been reduced to a ‘dreary ruin’; so eviscerated that 'nothing remained but a shell-like wall’. Given that Rochester’s secret first wife, Bertha Mason, will eventually burn down Thornfield Hall, this dream feels more like a premonition, and an accurate one at that. Then there’s the nocturnal sequence in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which takes place just after Angel marries Tess and discovers, to his horror, that she is not a virgin (a dynamic I unpacked in a previous week if you need more context.) While Angel is asleep, he looks at Tess, cries out ‘Dead! Dead! Dead!’, and rolls his wife up in a bedsheet ‘as in a shroud’. He then sleepwalks out of the house with Tess in his arms and deposits her into an ‘empty stone coffin’. With Tess subjected to her living grave, Angel is finally satisfied: ‘having kissed her lips a second time he breathed deeply, as if a greatly desired end were attained’.
It’s a strange scene - partly because it feels so unrealistic, but also because it feels so on the nose. Angel’s somnambulist activity is the exact physical expression of his repressed desire to both possess and punish his wife. This sort of thing is why I almost never enjoy dream sequences in books: they are moments in which the hand of the author inevitably feels too visible. A dream in a book means we are being given a clue, whether abstracted or obvious, about the psychology of the character dreaming. Being guided in this way often reminds a reader that they are engaging in fiction.
But are dreams really clues to anything? Ten years after Hardy’s Tess, the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams solidified an understanding of our night-time fantasies as wish fulfilment, their interpretation offering insight into our deepest wants and needs (often sexual). Modern scientific analysis, however, tells a different story. One recent neurological study suggests that a dream is actually more like a ‘data dump - a clearing of the day’s useless memories and a caching of the valuable ones.’ This theory, backed up by experiments on mice, puts paid to the idea that dreams are meaningful: ‘As data streams by on the computer screen of the sleeping mind, some of it gets snatched up and randomly stitched into the crazy quilt of dreams, which often only vaguely resemble the literal content of the information.’
This is compelling, but I personally prefer the hypothesis put forward in Will Storr’s excellent book The Science of Storytelling, which I have also talked about before. Storr cites compelling evidence that dreams are basically just the brain coming up with stories so as to make sense of ‘chaotic bursts of neural activity’. The fact that we often dream of falling or tumbling is actually because the brain is trying to make sense of a ‘myoclonic jerk’, a sudden spasming of muscles that happens while we sleep. So, our mind projects a picture of falling simply because it is the most logical explanation for body spasms that it can come up with. Storr uses this theory as evidence for one of the central points of his book, which is this: human beings are obsessed with inventing stories in order to make sense of data points. If you show a human three random pictures in succession, they will find a link between them, and then build a narrative. This is just how our brains work.
And this is how your brain works too, my friend. Like all of us, you are a narrative-making machine, and so you are predisposed to believe it is significant that you have dreamt about your ex at the start of a new relationship. And look, it absolutely might be. But it might also be that your brain is doing a bit of garbage disposal and chucking out memories of your ex to make room for someone new. Or it might be that your sleep is restless because you are excited about your new relationship, and so your dreaming mind is making sense of chaotic neural signals. I know I am a bit of a Hermione Granger, skeptical of anything that feels akin to reading a crystal ball. But I just don’t think we know enough about dreams to set any store by them. Your conscious mind and body is, in my opinion, the greatest source of insight into your past, present and future. So: how did your dream make you feel afterward? Not just in the surreal hinterland of horniness between waking and dreaming, but throughout the rest of the long old day? Has it prompted a genuine yearning for your ex, or is your mind just playing tricks on you? I think these are the questions you should be asking.
Ok, with all that out of the way, admittedly there is still one ethical question at play here, which is the keeping of a sex tape you made with your ex. I don’t mean the dreaming or the fantasising (as I said, thought police = bad idea), but the physical object of it. Should this be something you delete once a relationship is over/when you meet someone new? I did a straw poll at dinner on Friday night and results were inconclusive: most people said they’d be hurt if they caught their partner watching a tape of an ex, but would also consider it their right to keep such a tape themself, so hey, it seems like an area in which we are all delightfully hypocritical. And of all the private content to hold on to, I have the most sympathy for a tape, which is after all 50% your copyright. I think you should probably do whatever you hope your own exes/current partner would do, and bear in mind that the video could prove controversial if your current boyfriend or girlfriend stumbles on it.
Of course, if thoughts about your ex persist as you continue to build this new relationship, or if you reflect on your dream further and find that it is touching on something profound, then it’ll certainly be worth working through these feelings with a friend. Similarly, if you find yourself continuously returning to ex-related paraphernalia - be it sex tapes or WhatsApp chats or jumpers - then it may be that you need to spend more time processing the end of your last relationship before you can move on. But while dreams can be useful jumping off points for self-reflection, they can also be trick mirrors. The thoughts and feelings of your waking mind and body are what’s most important - and you tell me that you really like this new person. In my opinion, that’s the biggest thing to pay attention to.
Do you have a problem that needs Fictional Therapy? Write to me here.