Dear Julia:

Last year I had a soulful, heart-warming dream about a man I had never met. About a month later, I met him and felt as though all my nerves had been jump-started. I didn't tell him about the dream. During our conversation, he said that I looked really familiar to him, so we discussed all the places we frequented, but found no connection. I felt really connected to him, and torn when we had to part. When I saw him again about six months later, I decided to tell him about the dream. He looked shocked, and told me that he had also dreamed about me before we met, but didn't want to tell me because he was afraid I would think he was crazy. The situation is complicated by the fact that we are both married and don't want to hurt anyone, so we have decided to stop communicating. I've never experienced anything like this in my life, and am so confused. How can I feel so deeply for someone I hardly know? What does this mean?
- Amie

Dear Amie:

Dreams are real. There is nothing in the entire Universe that is NOT real, including our thoughts, fantasies and even what we normally label "hallucinations." They may not exist in the physical dimension where they can be weighed and measured with scientific instruments, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

When we dream, we actually travel through other dimensions, and so do other beings. Some of these seem like strangers, but most of them we either recognize as people we know during our waking life or friends we only see in our dreams. Surely you've had the experience of meeting up with someone in a dream that you felt you knew very well but couldn't place in "real life." That is someone with whom you have a "dream relationship."

We interact with all sorts of people while we're dreaming or out of the body. We have conversations with spiritual guides and teachers, visit with loved ones who have crossed over, and connect with friends we know via the internet but have never met in person. We also meet with people who are going to be important in our lives in some way, whom we've yet to encounter in the physical.

As the astral is a world of emotion, these relationships tend to be very rich and authentic. In the astral, all the "shoulds" of our social conditioning drop away, and we feel free to act on our true feelings. This allows us to readily connect with people who are truly like us deep down. We also release a lot of emotional tension that we've kept bottled up inside when we're awake.

Often that emotional tension is fear of some kind, but it can just as easily be desire. People who are longing for something and unable to find a way to get it in "real life" will have what is commonly called "wish fulfillment" dreams. When we remember that dreams are real, it becomes clear that when we're dreaming, we either seek and find or naturally draw to us experiences that will fulfill our repressed desires. Since everyone else in the astral is doing the same thing, people who share the same yearnings will naturally be drawn together.

We also have a strong psychic bond to people we have known and loved well in other lives, and this draws us back together again and again - even when we're in the astral. In fact, because physical distance is no barrier, it's easier to connect in the astral, so many times we will first meet in our dreams, and then in the physical.

We all have very rich lives beyond this plane, and what we remember from our dreams is just a tiny snippet of all that goes on there. What we're doing here in the physical may also be very different from our goals, dreams and experiences beyond this plane. It is therefore possible to have someone be a very key figure for us in another dimension, but not be so important in our waking lives. When we meet them in the physical, however, we may still have a very strong reaction, such as that strange feeling that we already have a relationship with this person, even though we don't really "know" them.

I have experienced this myself a number of times, but there is one story you may be particularly interested in. I was a young married mother, and had returned to university to finish my degree. It was the first day of the new semester, and when Charlie walked in, I was sitting in a large circle of desks in a creative writing seminar. Now, I had never met Charlie before (supposedly), but I had that strange feeling as soon as I saw him. You described it well when you wrote that it felt like all your nerves had been jump-started.

He walked straight over and took a seat next to me, and as we sat next to each other that first day, it hit me why he was so familiar: the night before, I'd had a dream about him! I could only remember a little piece of it, but in that dream, we were sitting on the seat of a motorcycle when he turned and kissed me, and it was one delicious kiss! Though I was really excited about the whole experience, like you, I didn't have the courage to mention the dream.

As the weeks went by, Charlie and I became fast friends, and there was some heavy sexual tension between us. Though we were tempted to act on our attraction for each other, we never did. What we DID do, however, was have a lot of very far out spiritual experiences together. He had been raised Catholic, and when I met him, he was totally tied up in that belief system and tormented with guilt for every little thing he had ever done "wrong." Through long, deep conversations and many mind blowing experiences (which just seemed to "happen" whenever we were together), his whole spiritual belief system was transformed.

Though I was very attached to him, the time came when I knew we had to go our separate ways. I haven't seen him for years now - at least not in my waking life. Perhaps we still connect in our dreams. (If we do, I don't remember it.)

I did recall a number of past lives we had shared, and realized that the deep bond we had forged had naturally drawn us back together. I also came to understand that just because we may have been lovers or married to someone in other lives, that doesn't mean that's how it's supposed to be this lifetime. (Wouldn't it be boring if we married the same person in every lifetime?) I eventually also realized that I was really starved for romance and affection in my marriage, so the delicious kiss on that motorcycle was a natural expression of my true but repressed feelings/desires.

So to come back to your question, as you can see, any number of things may be behind this experience. Perhaps he is going to prove to be someone important in the future, and you were arranging your meeting in that dream, or perhaps you were naturally drawn together because you know each other from a past life, or because you share the same feelings and desires deep down.

You may come to see the "purpose" behind this particular dream, and you may not. To me, just knowing that something mystical is occurring is enough. Experiences like this remind me that there is a whole lot of magic afoot in the Universe, and while I can't expect to solve every mystery under the sun, I certainly do enjoy wondering about them all!

- Julia