I am a single mother of a 6-year-old daughter. Her father and I have been divorced about three years. I had this dream some months ago. Usually I can’t remember my dreams but this one has really stayed with me.

In my dream, my daughter and I had just gone to bed. The house was dark except for the light over the stove that I always keep on so the house won’t be absolutely dark. My daughter is already asleep and I’m just about to drift off to sleep when I hear a noise downstairs. I get up to see what the noise is and as I come downstairs I see a man dressed in all black with a black ski mask over his face (like from the OJ Simpson trial). He is just coming through our living room window.

I immediately begin fighting him because I’m afraid he’ll hurt me or my daughter. We are in the living room on the floor and I’m fighting him with all my strength. In the midst of the struggle his ski mask comes off and it’s my ex-husband! I am furious! Why would he sneak into the house like that! It’s really on now.

I fight him even harder because I’m mad that he scared us like that. He gets away from me and begins grabbing things and tries to throw them out of the window like a vase and other small objects that would be easy for him to get away with. I wrestle them from his hands just before he gets to throw them out the window.

I’m fighting him even harder and I’m more angry than anything. Why would he sneak in like a burglar when he could just ring the doorbell and ask for anything that he wants? I’m not that attached to material possessions and he can have it if he really wants it that badly. Then he tries to climb back out of the window and just as he begins to crawl out, I drag him back in and continue fighting him. I fought him so hard that I woke up sweating and breathing hard. I don’t remember anything else past that point or even if I won or lost the fight. We were still fighting when I woke up.

—Cassandra

Hi Cassandra—

Dreams always reflect feelings and awarenesses that have been on our minds the few days prior to having the dream. Accordingly, I am curious if you can think back to when you had the dream (a few months ago) to see if you can remember what specific event occurred that renewed feelings of frustration with your ex.

Because you both have a child together, and because you are concerned for her in the dream, your dream shows that you feel like your ex is an “intruder” in your life right now, and that his actions threaten or endanger your daughter. The dream also shows that you feel he is operating in surreptitious and sneaky ways. In the dream he enters your house like a thief. If he wants something from you, why can’t he just call up and be honest with you?

By the way, your dream shows one more thing quite clearly: If he’s “messing around” with you—he definitely chose the wrong woman. You are tough!

Hello Dream Doctor—

I just remembered what happened before I had my dream. I have recently been dating a guy I knew from high school. We broke up once we graduated and went to separate colleges, but recently got back together. My ex is furious about this, asking me why did I have to go “all the way back to high school” to find a date.

My ex gives me constant grief about seeing him and when he’s in town to see me, my ex will go to our daughter’s school early and take her before I can get there to pick her up. I don’t object to his picking her up, but he seems to always do it when my new guy is coming to visit.

But what took the cake is when my ex picked our daughter up and then dumped her off at his mother’s all weekend. She called me and sounded so sad and pitiful and asked me to come pick her up because she wanted to come home. But I let her stay because I wanted to see if he would come back to pick her up—but he didn’t. He just took her to keep me from getting her. I ended up crying in front of my new guy because I had gotten so frustrated with his behavior and because he uses her as a weapon to get back at me. I know he really doesn’t want to have custody of our daughter but he wants to give me a hard time. And that’s when I had the dream.

Hi Cassandra—

Your experience yields an important insight into dreams. Dreams occur in response to specific feelings and events in our lives. Accordingly, when we seek to understand the cause of a dream, we want to look locally in our lives—what happened yesterday, or the day before—that made us have the dream today. We also want to be specific as opposed to general. We want to identify the specific events or incidents that caused the emotions represented in our dream. When we succeed in identifying the events, the dream is solved intellectually, and it is resolved emotionally.

Now that you understand your dream, we know that, in the future, you will take a different action when your ex tries to use your daughter as a weapon in his anger against you. This is unfair and unhealthy for your daughter, which is why you responded so fiercely in the dream. You want to protect your daughter!

Congratulations on figuring out your dream!