A dream with her

We were both in this hotel kind of room, which was mostly made of wood and stone like it was a rustic cabin at a lake somewhere, a little like this, although it had no windows and there was no sunshine, just lights kind of like a fireplace. It was a beautiful setting, and felt kind of comforting.

I don’t remember how it started exactly, but she was talking to me, and then she started getting tears in her eyes and apologizing for everything that had happened, not in a childish “I want you back”-way, but feeling genuine pain for what she had done and just wanting to make things right. First, I felt incredibly overwhelmed, because I had never seen her like that before; calm even though she was crying, accepting her responsibility not with extreme self-hatred, but with dignity.

She was sitting on the floor next to the bed something like this. The moment was so freaking emotional that I dropped to my knees next to her and started crying like I had never before, literally weeping out loud (maybe I did so outside the dream and just heard it with my own ears, no idea). I downright couldn’t handle what was happening, because it felt so utterly impossible that up to that point I hadn’t even imagined it in my wildest dreams (can’t say that anymore now, can I). I put my head on her lap and the rest of my body around her, she continued talking, even though I don’t remember what exactly she said. I wanted to apologize as well, but I literally couldn’t because I was crying so much, I was almost gasping for air. We were both crying, but it was an incredibly beautiful moment. It felt like all the fears and the sadness that I had were finally over, like all the problems in the world had no meaning anymore, and I could hold the person that meant so much to me in my arms again.

I woke up right after that, and needless to say, it was quite heart-breaking to find out it wasn’t reality.

Anyway, I think there are two realizations that this gave me (it’s going to take some more thinking until I fully grasp the second one, I think):

• Recently I had thought about her a lot after replying to her emails, and I felt like I had come to the conclusion that the person I was talking to at that moment was not the same person I spend 2 years of my life with. Not literally of course. But she had changed so much since the breakup that I could not recognize one thing about her that had made me fall in love with her back then. I assumed this thought had helped me a lot to get over her, since at that moment I could think about her almost like she was just another person I had known at some point in my life. But the dream kind of threw me back on that. I do miss that time a lot, I wish it had never ended, and she is still more to me than just a part of my past.
• I only realized several hours after waking up: The girl in the dream isn’t my ex – not as she is now, but also not as she was before the breakup. She isn’t my ex, but rather my ex as I always (at least unconsciously) wished her to be. What happened in my dream felt so impossible not just because of the breakup, but more importantly because she wouldn’t even have acted like that while we were still together. I feel like I have suppressed this during our entire relationship: She often acts childishly, pridefully and irresponsibly, and I shouldn’t have just forgiven her and blamed it on her mental disorders, as if I was trying to prove to myself that these things aren’t that significant to me or the relationship. I shouldn’t have had to be the bigger person every day when something came up.

  I want to be treated with respect on an equal level, I want to know that I can trust my partner to act responsibly and to truly have my best interest at heart, I want to know that I can be irresponsible too at times, and that they’re capable of dealing with that. This need was not met in our relationship, but I never truly wanted to accept that. The dream wasn’t so emotional because the breakup was undone, it was so emotional because for once in my life I felt respected and genuinely cared for, like I had never even imagined before. I never thought that it was this important to me, because I felt happy despite lacking fulfillment in that regard, but this dream made me realize how much I actually miss and need it.

Freud would be proud of me?