Adultery

But adultery depicts the union with, or giving of innermost feelings to, persons or objects for which you have no committed relationship, or do not have a deep affinity with. Or it may be an urge caused by physical or emotional hungers, or needs deeper than the social and religious codes pressing upon you. It is also a way of opening a door to new influences, a new direction in life that will in some way change you, flow back to you with its own needs, light and shadows.

Exactly what your dream reveals depends on your feelings in the dream and the events shown.

Seeing your partner having sex with someone else: You are probably deeply uncertain about your own value and doubt whether you are lovable. These feelings may hide painful dependence upon the loved person. This dependence may be based upon childhood needs that were never met, or were betrayed. This can of course be an intuition, but be careful in deciding which.

If the relationship is felt as pleasant it can be a simple desire for sexual change, satisfaction and adventure that is not satisfied in waking life. If it is resisted, it is nevertheless your own fantasy, so may be desire masked by guilt.

Dream adultery can also be a means of personal attack within a relationship. This because you are having sex with someone else so hitting or hurting your partner.

If the adultery is felt as a threat, it may express anxieties about your relationship.

A woman being someone’s mistress: Can be any of the above, but occasionally anxiety about security. This because becoming a mistress might bring financial or emotional support.

Seeing your partner having sex with someone else: You might be deeply uncertain about your own value and doubt whether you are lovable. These feelings may hide painful dependence upon the loved person. This dependence may be based upon childhood needs that were never met, or were betrayed. It can reflect anxiety or intuition about your partners fidelity. It can also mask a desire to be rid of your partner, to leave them. The adultery would give you an excuse to leave them.

Dreamer commits adultery: We all have sexual desires that sometimes attach to people other than our partner – or to people it would be difficult in reality to have a sexual relationship with. If you are having sex with another person, the dream may therefore be a release of sexual feelings. If so it is a harmless way of exploring sex with another person, or an expressions of wish fulfilment, desire for sexual variety, or guilt about wayward desires.

Resisted adultery: A sign of struggle with your sexual desires; expression of strength meeting opposition in life, therefore strength to overcome difficulties.

Maurice Nicoll, in his book The New Man, points out that the biblical mentions of adultery were not only direct references to that as a real act, but also to a symbolical meaning. As a symbol adultery represented being unfaithful to the one God – whoring after other gods. Taken in general, adultery might therefore carry a similar meaning, a sense of being unfaithful in a committed relationship, whether that relationship is marital, social, work or to ones ideals.

However, being faithful to one person for some people is tortuous and so it needs to be understood that for some people it is in their nature to be polygamous.

Useful questions are:

Am I somehow cheapening a valuable experience in life?

Do I long for something that is physically or emotionally forbidden to me?

Am I not admitting the needs I have ?

Does this show an area of my life that is full of energy that I do not let flow into my everyday life?

See Dream are Virtual Reality and What do you Bring to Your Dreams.

Comments

-Marzipan 2018-06-10 17:53:43

I keep having dreams where I am the one hooking up/having relationships with men that are in a relationship or married. The weird part is I actually enjoy being the mistress in my dreams. The first one I had I was one of several of this man’s mistresses and he was married. The last two have been about me hooking up and having a secret relationship with a man who has a girlfriend that lives in another city. All these dreams have occurred in the last week and I can’t seem to figure out why I keep having them and why I enjoy being the mistress in my dreams because it’s so polar opposite to what I would ever do in real life.

    -Tony Crisp 2018-06-12 9:48:52

    Marzipan – What is weird about enjoying being the mistress? Monogamous marriage was very different in the past from the modern conception of mutual fidelity. Though marriage was legally or sacramentally recognized between just one man and one woman, until the 19th century, men had wide latitude to engage in extramarital affairs. Any children resulting from those trysts, however, would be illegitimate, with no claim to the man’s inheritance.

    But during the enlightenment, women with money often had a contract with a man they fancied, usually only lasting a few years. Before that until recently love had little to do with it.

    “What marriage had before that period was that it really was not about the relationship between the man and the woman,” said Stephanie Coontz, the author of “Marriage, a History” (Penguin Books, 2006). “It was a way of getting in-laws, of making alliances and expanding the family labor force.”

    But in the long past early males and females had sex with many partners. Food sharing was principally in exchange for sexual favors, including sexual favors between same-gender pairs. Because females could collect food (fruits, nuts and insects) while still carrying and protecting their babies, males were not needed as protectors or providers. That meant that in this period neither partner gained from being in a committed pair.

    So it is only out of your present view of marriage and sexual partners that the view of weirdness arises. But the real origin of marriage came from the biological desire of both men and women to see their children survive – it was the evolutionarily dominate strategy. As marriage is no longer needed for children to survive, do we still need marriage?

    Relationships, whether heterosexual or homosexual, fail, even with the starting point of intense ’love’. Figures differ from fifty percent failure in the US, to one in three in the UK. Hetro or homo are about the same. Statistics show there is a huge decline in marriage, with a swing to living together without the ceremony. Also there is a massive increase in adults without a partner. It has risen from six point five to thirty percent since 1960.

    To avoid recognising that the social and personal climate surrounding marriage in our own times has changed is to invite heartache and feelings of failure. Best to recognise that a huge percentage of marriages and partnerships founder, and being human you face that possibility too. So it is certainly not strange to go for a partner that does not own you legally, and you can walk out on it or enter it without the ridiculous cost of getting married.

    If we cut through this fog and look at how these different practices originated, they arose out of environmental and racial needs.

-Maria P 2017-10-24 21:35:16

I had a really bad dream that my partner cheated on me with a friend of ours, and he took home a baby which was a product of that affair. What would it possibly mean?

    -Tony Crisp 2017-10-27 10:08:37

    Hi – It would help you to understand your dreams, if you would read – http://dreamhawk.com/news/summing-up/ and also http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/features-found-on-site/ which has so much information in.

    Nothing can replace your own ability to understand your dream. With a little effort you can do this by practising what is described in – http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson or http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/getting-at-your-dreams-meaning/

    Tony

    Maria – In life we fight, kill, lie and cheat for the sake of sex, so often we take such stories into our dreams. But mostly such dreams are caused by your own anxiety that you are not loved, are not attractive enough to compete in the sexual arena.

    Such anxiety often arises because as infants and children we never received enough love and support to give us a sure sense of our own worth. With it, if we are sure our partner has moved his affection elsewhere, we can say to him, “Okay, you have moved out of my life, so take your so called love elsewhere, because I know what love is, because I received it, and it isn’t what you are giving, you are more like a wandering sex addict.”

    Many people fail to connect with what they carry within them of their infant and child, because they avoid, or do not know how, to feel deeply, to let their body express and discharge that degree of emotion, bodily movement and excitation.

    If you are certain it isn’t anxiety, then decide what you want to do about it.

-Blue Rein 2017-10-22 11:09:38

Hello,

I recently had a dream that my lover and I were talking with some woman ive never met over Skype (we are polyamorous) and my lover walkyd out of the room to get something. I remained at the computer with the woman. It was assumed that neither of us knew the woman very well yet but based on the fact that she was pleasuring herself underneath a blanket while we were all on a video call, I believe there was a sexual relationship there. We had not met this woman in person yet.

Now this woman was beggining to enjoy herself very much and hearing the sounds she made caused me to enjoy myself too. Then I see my lover lying next to her and rather than the woman using her own hand to pleasure herself as I thought, it turns out that my lover was avitally the one pleasuring her. For a moment I am thrown off, confused and hurt because it turns out that my lover has known this woman long before me and yet never told me about her although it is clear he has a very intimate relationship with her and is still with her.

My lover removes the blanket that was covering them and shows me what they are doing, essentially involving me in their interactions, as he continues to pleasure her to the finish. This causes my previous feelings to be pushed aside and I feel pleasure as well finishing off with the woman though I have not been touched.

I woke up very disturbed, with the confused, hurt feelings still lingering inside me.

    -Tony Crisp 2017-10-24 9:29:10

    Hi – It would help you to understand your dreams, if you would read – http://dreamhawk.com/news/summing-up/ and also http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/features-found-on-site/ which has so much information in.

    Nothing can replace your own ability to understand your dream. With a little effort you can do this by practising what is described in – http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson or http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/getting-at-your-dreams-meaning/

    Tony

    Blue Rein – In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as spontaneous movement in dreams, in our breathing and heartbeat – our life. This I have given the description as the Life Will.

    This Life Will, because it has a much larger reference base than our human, personal self, often has a different view of our actions. I don’t see it as a moralising view, but one based on our innate homeostatic process – The tendency of the body to seek and maintain a condition of balance or equilibrium within its internal environment, even when faced with external changes. The action also works with out mental as well as our physical self.

    So I see your dream as a way to attempt a balancing of your life activity. Your conscious self and your Life core have different feelings, so you experience feeling ‘disturbed, with the confused, hurt feelings still lingering inside me.’

    But we have to remember that having a personality with self awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So the development of self awareness was and is an immense step, and leaves us very vulnerable, and still does. Look around at the number of people who have to take anti-depressants, or who have to use alcohol every day, or smoke or take other drugs – all means of facing the difficulty of meeting self awareness.

    Obviously we are in the midst of huge personal and social change, and to find peace we may need to balance the needs of our personal life with our core process. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/core/ also http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/

-K 2017-08-03 8:01:21

My dream was that my husband fell in love with another woman and brought her into our home to stay. I felt like I was put on the back burner and I remember feeling so hurt knowing he was so interested in her mentally and sexually. There were changes in the home of material things and I felt lost and hopeless. I’m having a hard time understanding.

-Ashley 2017-07-14 23:55:08

I had a dream that I was watching my husband having sex with someone and I enjoyed watching them, it was a huge sexual release for me and afterwards we were all over each other.

-Loren 2017-06-14 16:30:47

I dream pretty often, that my husband is having sex with another woman. In one occasion i didnt see her face. In this last occasion i saw the girls face and it was someone he had called out of an escort magazine. What does this mean?

-Andrew 2017-06-06 0:57:55

My dream was that my wife and i were in the house talking and then she confessed that she had sex with other guys multiple times then i felt really betrayed.

-K'Aelle 2017-05-24 10:35:41

Really would like to know what this is about… very simple and quick, had a dream similar to this… was having sex with my wife, went tilt to some water, all of 5 seconds, turned back around she’s having sex with my uncle, right in my bedroom…

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