Break-ups are hard they can really take their toll on your mental capacity to function. The break-up really gets inside your head and it stays there for days sometimes weeks. Your thoughts are filled with what you have or wished you had said, you repeat conversations and situations over and over again in your head. You replay the situation and think that if you had said or done something different the eventual outcome would have been different.

You can also start to doubt the foundation of the relationship itself and may start to attribute blame to yourself or your ex partner for not doing something or not being there. It is also common to become paranoid about the relationship and you may start to think that your ex partner was cheating on you and it is then again easy to become trapped in your own thoughts and start to analyse all of their previous behaviour.

So it is no wonder that you can have trouble sleeping during a break-up, but sleep is what you need. Your mind is on over drive and sort of experiencing shock. Think of a computer trying to analyse the last few years of its history all at once, it would be running many processes and would slow down its performance. This is what your brain is going through at the moment and more, because not only are you analysing the past you are also thinking of and trying to predict the future, an impossible task for anyone but we still try.

It’s fair to say your head is filled with break-up thoughts, so it is no wonder you may dream of the break-up or of the relationship itself. The dreams can range from dreaming of the fights of the break-up to remembering the happy parts of the relationship or even as I did the future that never came to be. During my break-up I dreamt of marrying my ex as we were due to get married shortly before we broke up, and the worst part is waking up. When you awake you suddenly remember that it was all just a dream and you are experiencing a break-up and that the dreams are not real. This is hard to cope with and can make you feel terrible in the morning.

The best and only real thing you can do is to get yourself up out of bed, and go out do something you enjoy with friends or family. Speak to your friends and family about the dream as I’m sure they will understand what you are going through.

Try not to dwell on the dream as it was just that, a dream, your brain is still trying to figure and process what has happened over the last few days. You could try watching a film or TV series, something light hearted before going to bed to slow down your thought processes and stop you thinking about the break-up as this may help reduce your brain activity.

The dreams will stop eventually but you have to be patient and live with them for now.