A:  Sometimes our dreams can be so vivid, or so memorable, that we can’t help but feel that they have some special significance. It sounds like this dream of yours has affected you like that. The fact that it is a sexual dream also gets attention—especially since you are married…it sounds as if you have a bit of discomfort about this.

The Urantia Book tells us a lot about our minds , and the different levels of consciousness that we can experience while here in the flesh. In the sleep state, our minds are at rest, but still working—dreams are the mind’s way of reconciling many things, but except in very rare cases, our dreams are certainly not reality. The Urantia Book calls dreams “fantasies of the night season.” We may do things in our dreams that we might never do in a waking state, and yet, dreams are a very natural process, and not to be feared. “…your ordinary dream experiences are purely physiologic and psychologic phenomena.”

Here are a couple of Urantia Book passages about dreams that may help you get a better perspective on their meaning: The first one speaks to the presence of God in the human mind—the Thought Adjuster :

110:5.2 Man’s dream experiences, that disordered and disconnected parade of the unco-ordinated sleeping mind, present adequate proof of the failure of the Adjusters to harmonize and associate the divergent factors of the mind of man.

150:3.9 The interpretation of dreams is largely a superstitious and groundless system of ignorant and fantastic speculation. The gospel of the kingdom must have nothing in common with the soothsayer priests of primitive religion.

In this thinking about dreams and their meaning, we have to remember that what we do in the waking state is of far greater importance than any unusual or even uncharacteristic things we may do in our dream life. If you are happily married (and even if you’re not), this dream of having sex with an anonymous man is only that—a dream. It is not something that you have actually done, nor something that you necessarily want to do. It is only a dream, and springs from a place in your mind that is not accessible except in sleep.

Dreams do not have reality. They come not from waking consciousness and not from the superconsciousness, but from the deepest subconscious parts of our minds. I have long thought about dreams as the sweepings from the cellars of our minds. They are a healthy mental process that all of us experience, and just letting them go helps us to keep our minds clean and clear for higher purposes.

I have never heard of a “spirit husband.” And I would advise you not to entertain the idea that you somehow have a separate existence in the dream-state. You have a real, flesh-and-blood husband in your real life. The best thing you could do is to concentrate on him and your marriage, and ask God to guide you in the best ways to strengthen your union. In prayer, thank God that he is allowing these fantasies to bubble up and away while you are asleep, and pray that he removes memories of any troubling dreams from your waking state from now on.

Allow yourself to concentrate more fully on the present—your waking state—and realize that dreams can be fantastic, comforting, or even scary, but they are not real, and they do not indicate that your character is weak; they are not an indicator of things that have happened, or that will happen. Thank God for the gift of your mind, and the further gift of his holy Presence in that mind. Stay close to God and allow his holy peace to displace any anxiety over these dreams.

Said Jesus:

155:6.6 “The prophet who said, ‘He will be kept in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on God.’ was not a mere intellectual believer in authoritative theology. This truth-knowing human had discovered God; he was not merely talking about God.”

Thanks again for writing with your question. I hope that my reply has been of some help to you today. You can follow the underlined links I have given you above to find out more about your mind, about dreams, and about The Urantia Book.