This is Happy Endings — a weekly+ newsletter on love, relationships, and sex, from me, Abigail, a sextech-working, monogamous, married mom who used to be a relationship anarchist feminist activist. Can you summarize a person like that? I don’t know. But I hope you keep reading. Kisses.
We were on a sex cruise with some friends of ours. There was some drinking. I got jealous.
It was a dream. Not as in I’d always wanted to be jealous on a sex cruise. I was asleep, and my subconscious was doing its thing. But we didn’t know that when I was in it. So the conversation I had with my mind’s manifestation of my husband felt real.
Cheating dreams are so common; they are an Instagram trend. “Cheated in her sleep, paid for it awake,” the text overlays say. And I get it. I once tried to force my super-straight husband’s bisexual awakening after I dreamt he sucked a stranger’s dick on an airplane. There were even more times when I asked for extra verbal affirmations after an infidelity dream that shook me. Of course, there have also been times when my dream self was the unfaithful one. I don’t talk about those, though.
These cheating dreams have a funny stigma. We hide them or stress out about them, and project our subconscious messages onto our partner. These reactions aren’t a coincidence. It’s connected to why these dreams occur in the first place.
Dreams are memory consolidation, emotional processing, and threat simulation. And, sure, maybe sometimes something divine. But when one part of a happy couple has the sort of interpersonal nightmare that causes the dream feelings to carry over into the day, there’s a good reason. But to identify the reason, you have to know how to decode dreams. And from what I’ve learned, you can’t find the answers on Reddit.
I Wanted to Know What Cheating Dreams Really Meant
That dream about your partner cheating is unlikely prophetic. And I'm saying this as someone who legit visits mediums. I believe in spiritual dream interventions and other once-wacky shit, like how our waking mind might not be ready to stitch together all the clues you’ve clocked, so it turns them into a dreamscape story that bursts the bubble you’ve been telling yourself. These phenomena could theoretically be happening to you, of course, but most likely your dream isn't about someone else. Most likely, your dream is just doing what dreams do: process your own shit.
Fortunately, figuring out what the dream means — a miraculous spiritual interjection, subconscious scene-stitching, or just run-of-the-mill shit-processing — is kinda the same.
So, I Talked With A Dream Analyzer
My dream-analyzing witchy friend told me that dreams are a method of processing information. It’s our mind’s way of helping us wake up better prepared for our day. Sometimes we can do this without dwelling further. We could, of course, let our subconscious soak up the scene, smile for the free entertainment, and move on. I usually do this. But sometimes a dream really hits me and makes me wonder what the fuck is the point? For those moments, this is what my dream analyst told me to do.
The most important thing to know first, she said, is “Everyone, and everything, in a dream is you.”
Your husband isn’t your husband. The airplane isn’t an airplane. The cocktails aren’t cocktails. Each represents an aspect of yourself communing with yourself.
Given that, to pick apart a dream and recognize its meaning, you cannot depend on a dream book’s encyclopedia of symbols. What airborne blowjobs mean to a random Reddit user has no bearing on my dream’s significance. My dream analyst cannot tell me what it means either. She can only guide me into realizing it for myself. No affiliate links, so it must be legit!
How My Dream Analyst Suggests Studying Your Own Infidelity Dreams
But this fact is frustrating for the same reason the Instagram trend implies dreamers are angry with their real lovers for imagined harms. It is far easier to offload blame and responsibility than it is to self-inquire. So, to help, let me spell this out in two ways — with a list, and with examples.
First, the list: To figure out what your dream means, you only need to do two things.
1) Recognize that YOU are everything in your dream. The lake, the bed, and the clown playing the violin represent parts of you that will help you learn from the gift of the dream.
2) To identify these representations and the underlying point of the overall dream, all you need to do is talk, or write down what stood out to you — the feeling you felt, the things you saw, what you did, and what those around you were doing — and start asking yourself what these various pieces mean to you.
From your own waking answers, you’ll soon notice the theme.
Maybe you’re not worried about your boyfriend sleeping around, but really you’re dissatisfied with your life. Maybe you’re not actually afraid of your wife wanting a divorce, you just need to recognize how little action you’re taking to make your life yours. It could be as simple as recognizing how you’ve been taking your partner for granted before it’s too late. Or as tangential as a call to confront your control issues, or to question your sexuality.
My Cheating Dreams Have Helped Me Love Better
I’ve written before about how I was haunted by a fleck of glitter and numerous cheating dreams. I could’ve let those flecks drive me crazy. Instead, I listened. And ultimately had a reckoning with how monogamous relationships made me feel a lack of control that I had successfully evaded for many single, relationship-anarchic years. Noticing this was a massive step toward a more peaceful, contented, and loving life.
My husband, on the other hand, says he’s never had one. He says all his dreams are like The Backrooms. Even more strangely, he says he likes them. What does that say about his subconscious? Personally, I’d take a couple of infidelity nightmares a year instead of a steady stream of that.
Speaking of which, the examples:
If, dear reader, you can imagine how a bit of dream reflection might aid your life, and want to study this analysis method through my embarrassing case studies, read on…
