What Does It Mean to Dream of Making Love With a Stranger?

Sex dreams can be fun, but when they cast familiar people from your waking life in unfamiliar roles, that is sometimes awkward. Dreaming of making love with a stranger at least does not have that challenge.

Your dream of making love with a stranger can therefore speak articulately about your own issues without the distraction of involving people you already know.

Making Love With a Stranger Dream Symbolism

Sexual Energy

Sometimes a dream about sex is actually about sex. Your dream of making love with a stranger can symbolize that you are experiencing sexual energy in your life and looking for a sexual partner. Fortunately, dreams are a safe, risk-free environment where you can see what you do and don’t like in a partner.

Loneliness

Dreaming of making love with a stranger can symbolize that you are lonely in general, especially if there are not people in your waking life that you have this sort of connection with. Even if your loneliness is not primarily sexual in nature – if what you really need is actually emotional or intellectual intimacy – your dream could still use the imagery of sexual connection to depict your need for companionship.

Novelty

A dream of making love with a stranger could symbolize that you are bored with your present life and the people in it. You may need to mix up your routine and expand your social circle to satisfy your craving for new experiences. While your boredom could be focused specifically on your sexual needs, it might otherwise be a broader boredom where you need more intellectual stimulation as well.

Alternately, a dream of making love with a stranger could happen in a situation where you have been very social and meeting a lot of new people lately. Even if the stranger in your dream is not just a new acquaintance you haven’t committed to memory yet, the dream could come from a sense that finding the right partner is within reach for you.

Personal Growth

As discussed in people dream symbolism, a stranger in your dream can symbolize associations you have with general qualities that the stranger has in your dream. The qualities that stand out in the stranger in your sex dream might be qualities that you are attracted to and want to have more of in your own life.

For example, if you dream of making love with a stranger who happens to be an artist, this could symbolize that you are interested in developing your own artistic potential.

The stranger in your dream could also represent a hidden side of yourself that needs to become more integrated into your main personality. This could be a situation where you need to find more balance between masculine and feminine parts of yourself, but, in other cases, the trait in question might be unrelated to gender issues.

Common Dreams of Making Love With a Stranger

Dream of making love with a stranger when you are single

If you dream of making love with a stranger when you are single, this could symbolize that you are getting to a place where you are ready to pursue sexual companionship, especially if you have been single for a long time. Your dreams may know before your waking mind does that you are opening up to let another person into your life.

Reflecting on the experience you had in your dream is an opportunity for you to see, with less muss and fuss than online dating, what you like and don’t like in a partner. If you are not very experienced sexually, your dream might even give you a sense of what positions or techniques would feel good for you.

Dream of making love with a stranger when you are in a relationship

If you dream of making love with a stranger when you are in a relationship, this does not necessarily mean that you want to leave your current partner.

The meaning of your dream could instead be similar to that of the song “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes, which describes a man bored with his relationship answering a newspaper personal ad and discovering it was placed by his current partner. He and his partner then open up to each other about their more adventurous sides and reinvigorate their relationship.

Your dream could therefore show that you and your partner would benefit from trying new things together, or that you have recently started doing so.

If the emotional atmosphere of the dream was negative, however, this dream could symbolize that you and your partner have grown apart to the point that you might as well be strangers. Maybe your partner is going through a time of great change, and you feel like you don’t know them anymore.

You might even consciously agree that the change your partner is making is objectively a good one, but, on a deeper level, you might feel left out of their journey. Some personal growth processes do tend to make people turn inward, but you may be able to communicate to your partner that you need to get to know them again.

Dream of having a bad experience making love with a stranger

If you dream of making love with a stranger, and you consent to it, but the experience turns out to be awkward or disappointing, this could symbolize that you have anxiety about your ability to connect with people.

Maybe you have had difficult social experiences in the past, and you are reluctant to put yourself out there again for more of the same. If you are dreaming about it, though, some part of you wants to try.

Alternately, a dream of having a bad experience making love with a stranger could symbolize that you are trying too hard for companionship. You may be so desperately lonely that you are throwing yourself at anyone who crosses your path even if they are not a good match for you. Such a dream could therefore advise you to step back and reflect on what you really need in a mate.

If you dream of a sexual experience with a stranger that crosses the line into rape or sexual assault, see rape dream symbolism. Such a dream could symbolize that you feel like the people around you disrespect your boundaries and lack empathy for you.

Dream of making love with a stranger who is not a gender you usually pursue

If you dream of making love with a stranger who is not a gender you usually pursue sexual or romantic companionship – for example, if you are a straight woman dreaming of making love with a woman – this may be jarring. While sexual orientation can be complex, having a dream of this sort does not necessarily mean that your sexual orientation is different from what you understand it to be, as also noted in kissing dream symbolism.

A dream like this is probably more about a challenge to boundaries in general. Whether your view of yourself is “I am a straight man who only makes love with women” or “I am a gay man who only makes love with men,” either way, you have a boundary that you don’t cross.

Your dream of crossing that sexual boundary could symbolize that some other important boundary in your life has been crossed, either by you or by someone else. Even if whatever happened there had nothing to do with sex, it could be disruptive to an extent that the idea of boundaries itself is threatened for you – if something that you relied upon for certainty has been trampled, what can you still be certain about?

A dream like this may symbolize that you cannot be certain about everything in life and that sometimes you need to learn to live with ambiguity.

Conclusion

A dream of making love with a stranger is an opportunity for your subconscious mind to concoct just the partner to meet your needs. The needs may be straightforward satisfaction, or they might be a lesson you need to learn.