Twenty five years on, one can easily see the mistakes made in their youth. But, as the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. There is little to be gained by rehashing past mistakes in your head again and again, losing sleep over it, and making yourself mental in the process. And yet this is exactly what I did on a regular basis. It's said that without closure, no relationship is ever truly over. It's also been written that sometimes closure can come from writing a letter to your ex that you never intend to send. But sometimes closure can come in the form of a dream...
The first time I ever experienced what I would define as a "lucid wet dream" I was certain that I was somehow "quantum leaping" into my past self from the present. I had prepared for bed that night, a middle-aged man in my forties, snuggled in beside my wife. She was pregnant with our fourth child, and sex was something I dimly seemed to recall from nearly a year ago. My wife and I loved one another deeply, but with three kids and one on the way, making time for intimacy and passion is not often possible.
This night, I was horny, and my wife was understandably tired and eight months along, and not in any mood for sex. Although I was excited about becoming a father again in less than a month, I was frustrated. I was horny and riled up with too much sexual energy to just fall asleep. As I lay there, eyes closed, I started to fantasize about my earlier days, back in my late teens, when I was almost as frustrated sexually as I was this evening.
I had a "girlfriend" at that time, and she was insatiable - except when it came to having actual sex. She thought about it constantly, but never acted on it with me or any other living person besides herself. I swear that every minute we spent together in person, I could smell her potent pheromones even over her perfume, and the scent drove me wild with unrequited passion. Every move I'd make to bring my body close enough to hers to make a move, she'd wriggle away from like I had the plague. She was terrified of sexual contact, yet fascinated in the extreme by the idea.
It wasn't that Ruth was unattracted to me, as we'd talked about sex more times than I could count, but never in a way that lead to physical intimacy. Ruth's problem, as I saw it, was that she'd learned early on to seek other outlets for her sexual needs. In a nutshell, she was addicted to masturbation. In particular, shared masturbation through fantasy. You can venture a guess as to who was her lucky (or was it unlucky) partner in carnal chit-chat.
Ruth was not one to masturbate alone, at least not entirely. Her way was to call me up at all hours (or I her, it was mutual) and we'd pretend that we were "collaborating" on a writing project. She'd create these characters in her mind that were avatars for herself. Through these virtual personae, Ruth would fantasize about real sexual adventures that she was too terrified to attempt as her real self. And let me tell you, she had a torrid imagination! Many were the nights, and many times per night, that she lit me on fire from my loins to my cerebrum.
When I say we would pretend, that was exactly what we were doing. Never once did we discuss what we were actually doing during these ten and twelve hour marathon phone sessions, and any effort I made to "break down the wall" between the reality of what we were doing and fantasy was quickly side-stepped by her. I'd hint that I was stroking my cock while we talked but she'd act like she didn't hear me until I said "(insert character name) is stroking his cock." Somehow she couldn't commit to the fact that I was a real, live, horny guy her own age who had real needs of my own. And neither could Ruth admit that she was just as horny and just as excited as I was. She could only interact with me sexually when we were both in character.
Often, after several marathon orgasmic escapades, Ruth and I would be so exhausted we'd fall asleep in our beds with the phone still glued to our ears. It was somehow comforting for me to wake up and hear Ruth's regular, rhythmic breathing over the earpiece. We were sleeping together, in truest fashion – or at least, as true as any virtual relationship could ever be.
It was at times when I would awake, early in the wee hours, and hear Ruth soundly sleeping safe in her bed, that I would tell her just how I felt. I'd whisper softly into her ear that I loved her, had loved her from the moment we first met, and how much I wanted to see our relationship evolve from this – whatever this was – into something real. I know she heard me. I know because her best girlfriend, Lori, confronted me about it one day. She said, "Ruth told me that you said some things last night to her in her sleep" and then go on to say that these things were "very confusing" to her and that I should stop.
My first reaction was to tell Lori to go clean the impulse manifolds in her pajamas. But then I started thinking, and realized that for her to know, Ruth must have told her. And by told her, I mean the whole, sordid mess. Otherwise Lori would wonder why Ruth fell asleep on the phone with me, a guy who was not her "boyfriend" and for whom she had no feelings other than that of friendship.
That gave me hope. It made me realize that Ruth really did care about where our relationship was at present, and where it was headed. It told me also that she was not capable of seeing me in the role of "boyfriend." In order for me to be her boyfriend meant terminating the special friendship we had, at least in her mind. She couldn't bear to lose me as a friend. That's what she eventually told me, when I finally summoned up the courage to tell her outright that I loved her.
Over the decades since, I've gone over our strange relationship in my mind thousands of times, trying to figure out just what was really going on. If I'd become a psychiatrist, maybe I'd have a chance at coming to a retroactive diagnosis for what this really was, and a possible solution. But I wasn't a shrink and those days were far in the past and never to be relived.
