The dream-visitation

Twice in my life I have had the following dream:

It is the final evening of my senior year of college, and I am on campus. The following morning, I will graduate and then leave campus for good.

That evening, I meet and sleep with a female student. She is one year younger than I am, and we stay in her dorm room.

Before the sex act, we agree that this will be our only time seeing one another; there are no pretensions of “staying together after graduation,” and we consciously engage in sex for the pleasure.

Afterward, we stay up talking the entire evening. Our conversation is highly poetic, sensitive, and connected; we talk of art, literature, religion, our families. Despite our ages, there is a blindingly mature quality to the entire thing: our ability to demarcate the experience as a one-off, the tenor, vulnerability, and ambition of our conversation despite that limitation. When morning comes, I leave the female student’s apartment, and it is my sense that we keep our agreement not to amplify this experience as anything more than it was.

The most interesting part of the dream is that, both times I have awoken from it, I have also known in my soul that it was not merely a dream; the female student’s image did not refer to some past lover in my life, nor to some inner facet of my psyche. No: there was—is—some alternate reality in which I meet and interact with this person, and twice now I have visited that reality.

It is fascinating to me that dreams can help us interrogate our psyches, receive messages from others in our lives, and even visit planes of existence barred from us in conscious living, and upon our waking we instinctually know which is which. Why have I twice now encountered this mysterious, self-assured lover? Even in this reality, why is it that the exchange leaves me not with longing, but with deep contentment and fondness in my soul?

Have you ever had a dream like this? One that you knew constituted not a portal within this reality, but a portal to another? If so, how did you differentiate this dream from other, more mundane dreams? What was or seems to be the significance of the dream in your life?