Journal

The Dream Detective Blog: Cheating Dreams

July 17, 2017 1 Comment

by Mimi Pettibone

Have you ever dreamed that your partner was cheating on you, and woken up so mad that you could hit them with your pillow? This is a lot more common than you think! While it may cause us to wonder ‘is my partner really cheating?’, usually this dream is a metaphor for something else. If you have reasons to believe your partner is actually having an affair, then do your homework to find out the truth so you can either put your mind at ease or make the necessary decisions to address the situation and take care of yourself. However, in the majority of cases this dream is a symbol of feeling cheated out of time with our partner.

One woman had recurring dreams over a span of 5 years that her husband was cheating on her. When I asked if anything had changed at the beginning of those 5 years, she realized that was around the same time he took a job that required him to travel a lot. When we looked at the frequency and timing of the dreams they correlated with when he was either on a business trip, or about to go on one. His travels became ‘the other woman’ in her dream world, and she most certainly was feeling cheated out of her time with him while he was gone. Working with and understanding these recurring dreams, and sharing them with her husband, prompted them to plan special ‘date nights’ and spend more time together while he was in town. This both reassured her psyche and fortified their relationship. After this awareness, and the consequent action they took to remedy the situation, she no longer had the recurring dreams even when he left town.

Another woman had a dream that she was the one doing the cheating on her boyfriend. She had recently taken up a new hobby and was spending a lot of time in classes and practice groups for her new interest. Her boyfriend was not only fine with it, he was very actually very supportive of her pursing her passion and he enjoyed her newfound enthusiasm. However, she had some old programming that said it wasn’t OK to take care of her own needs while in a relationship. These old messages triggered feelings of guilt, which then created the dream story of her cheating on her boyfriend. We are all living unconscious stories that can be very strong drivers for how we run our lives. When we break the script of our story, even though it may be in a very healthy way, it can feel like we are doing something ‘wrong’ even though it is very right in the sense of enhancing our quality of life and our sense of connection to self and other. This dream brought to light her old programming and caused her to re-evaluate it, while at the same time it prompted her, like the previous dreamer, to add some quality time with her boyfriend to her busy schedule.

Whether it is our self or our partner who is the ‘cheater’, anything that feels like it takes away from our relationship can translate to the symbol of cheating. Factors such as working a lot of hours, caring for a family member, excess time spent on electronic devices, even physical or mental health issues such as chronic illness or depression can feel like they are taking away from our relationship. Our dreaming mind cares deeply about our relationships, and will show us when we need to tend to them to fulfill our spirit’s longing for connection as best as we can. If you have this dream theme, consider it a message to explore the ways in which connection may have been compromised, and use it as a catalyst to repair and spend more time with the person you love.

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Mimi Pettibone is a professional dream worker who offers private consultations at East West Bookshop and by phone. Her practice includes dream interpretation and personal growth work focused on relationships, communication and authentic life path. She also offers tarot and oracle readings and is the creator of the Enchanted Art Oracle Cards. Her background includes humanistic and social psychology, relationships and communication skills, spirituality, consciousness, and linguistics. Mimi is also a monthly dream columnist for the New Spirit Journal.

For more info on Mimi, or to book a consultation: www.thedreamdetective.com