The most effective way to stop dreaming about someone is, counterintuitively, to stop trying so hard not to think about them. Actively suppressing thoughts of a person during the day makes you significantly more likely to dream about them at night. This “dream rebound” effect is well-documented, and understanding it is the first step toward reducing those unwanted dreams.
Beyond that core insight, several practical strategies can help: processing your feelings about the person while awake, changing your pre-sleep routine, and even learning to recognize when you’re dreaming so you can redirect the experience in real time.
Why Trying Not to Think About Them Backfires
Research from Harvard University found that when people were told to suppress thoughts of a specific person before falling asleep, 34% of them dreamed about that person, compared to just 24% of people who were simply told to think about whatever they wanted. The suppressed person also appeared more frequently within the dream itself. People who suppressed thoughts averaged roughly twice as many references to that person in their dream reports as people who hadn’t been told to suppress.
This held true regardless of whether the person was someone emotionally significant (like a crush) or someone neutral. The act of suppression itself drives the rebound, not the emotional weight of the relationship. So if you’ve been spending your evenings actively pushing someone out of your mind, telling yourself “don’t think about them,” you’re likely feeding the exact dreams you want to stop.
What Actually Helps Reduce the Dreams
Since suppression is counterproductive, the goal is to process your thoughts about this person in a controlled, deliberate way during the day so your brain doesn’t need to do that processing at night. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Allow Yourself a Designated “Thinking Window”
Set aside 15 to 20 minutes during the day to let yourself think about this person freely. Write about them in a journal, talk to a friend, or just sit and let the thoughts come. The point isn’t to ruminate or spiral. It’s to give your brain a waking outlet so those thoughts don’t queue up for sleep. When the window ends, redirect your attention to something engaging. This is different from suppression because you’re not fighting the thoughts; you’re containing them.
Change Your Pre-Sleep Mental Routine
What you think about in the 10 to 20 minutes before falling asleep has an outsized influence on dream content. If you’re scrolling through this person’s social media, rereading old messages, or lying in bed rehearsing conversations, you’re essentially setting the stage for them to appear in your dreams. Replace that window with something absorbing but unrelated: a podcast, an audiobook, a visualization of a place you want to visit. You’re not blocking the person out. You’re filling the space with something else.
Reduce Daytime Triggers
Your brain pulls dream material from recent waking experiences. Every time you encounter something connected to this person (their social media posts, a song you associate with them, a mutual friend bringing them up), it refreshes their presence in your short-term memory. Muting or unfollowing them, putting away physical reminders, and gently steering conversations away from them reduces the raw material your brain has to work with when it constructs dreams.
How Long the Dreams Typically Last
If the person you’re dreaming about is an ex-partner, be prepared for some patience. Research published in the International Journal of Dream Research found that ex-partner dreams remain surprisingly common even years after a separation, and those dreams tend to be less emotionally positive than dreams about a current partner. This doesn’t mean something is wrong with you or that you haven’t moved on. It reflects how deeply the brain encodes people who were once central to your daily life.
The frequency does decline over time, especially as new experiences, routines, and relationships gradually overwrite the neural pathways associated with that person. The dreams don’t typically stop all at once. They thin out, become less vivid, and eventually carry less emotional charge even when they do occur. If you’ve recently gone through a breakup or a falling out, expect the dreams to be most frequent in the first few weeks and to slowly taper from there.
Using Lucid Dreaming to Change the Dream
If the dreams are persistent and distressing, some people find relief by learning to recognize they’re dreaming and then redirecting the experience. This is called lucid dreaming, and one of the most studied methods for achieving it is the MILD technique, developed by sleep researcher Stephen LaBerge.
The steps are straightforward. As you lie in bed, recall your most recent dream in detail. Identify something in the dream that should have tipped you off it wasn’t real (a “dream sign”). Then mentally replay the dream, but this time, imagine yourself recognizing that sign and becoming aware you’re dreaming. As you drift off, repeat to yourself: “Next time I’m dreaming, I will remember I’m dreaming.” The key is to fall asleep while still holding that intention.
Once you can reliably achieve lucidity, you can add a specific goal: “Next time I’m dreaming and this person appears, I will turn away and explore something else,” or “I will recognize this is a dream and choose to fly.” You’re not trying to erase the person from the dream. You’re giving yourself agency within it, which often takes away the emotional sting. This takes practice. Most people don’t achieve consistent lucid dreaming immediately, but even occasional success can reduce the feeling of being trapped in unwanted dreams.
When Recurring Dreams Signal Something Deeper
Occasional dreams about someone you’re trying to forget are normal. Your brain consolidates memories and processes emotions during sleep, and people who occupy a lot of your emotional bandwidth naturally show up in that process. But if the dreams are intensely distressing, happen nearly every night, and significantly affect your sleep quality or daytime functioning, that pattern sometimes reflects unresolved grief, anxiety, or trauma rather than simple memory processing.
This is especially true if the dreams involve a person connected to a traumatic experience. Recurring nightmares tied to trauma follow different neurological patterns than ordinary dreams and often don’t respond to the strategies above. Cognitive behavioral therapy designed for insomnia and nightmares, particularly a technique called imagery rehearsal therapy where you rewrite the nightmare’s script while awake and mentally rehearse the new version, has strong evidence behind it for breaking that cycle. A therapist who specializes in sleep or trauma can guide that process.