Des – Being a lucid dreamer, your dream is so openly about you and your dream it almost explains itself. That is because many people say they dream lucidly, but in fact are controlling what they dream. Your dream is an exploration of a theme about love without control. See
https://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/lucid-dreaming/The two parts of you are the youthful you meeting and an older and experienced you. The older you has obviously met difficulties in loving, and are learning by experiencing how it was done by the youthful you in the dream.
Dreams often stand in place of actual experience. So through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally. For instance many young women dream in detail of giving birth. This function of what might be called ‘imagination’ is tremendously undervalued, but is a foundation upon which human survival is built. So you dreamt a new way of loving – of course you as a life form didn’t begin at conception, for like all seeds, all past experience is stored in the seed. So, your incredible unconscious memory has experienced love in all its ways.
Of course your present life is unique and you had trauma in your childhood, but dreams constantly try to show ways of healing or growing beyond such hurts – as you appear to have done or are doing.
I feel that watching things grow from a seed is an incredible lesson on our own lives; for the processes of growth in nature develop structures and organs as they move towards something. The plant develops stem and leaves before it can open its flower. So, your own inner growth may need to develop things before it can manifest certain parts of you. The mystery is beyond imagination in its enormity, so in your dream you touch what some people have called the Hugeness.
Tony