We Met in a Dream—And Then I Found Him in Real Life

I used to think dreams were just echoes of the mind—unpredictable, beautiful nonsense that faded with the morning light. That was before I met him.

In the dream, he stood at the edge of a lake, his silhouette glowing in soft twilight. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I remember the way the wind moved through his hair and how he turned to look at me like he had been waiting forever. No words were spoken, but the silence between us felt full—like everything we needed to say had already been said in another lifetime.

I woke up breathless.

It wasn’t the first time I had dreamed of him. Over the past three months, he appeared again and again—in city streets I’d never visited, in gardens that bloomed with colors not found in this world, in bookstores, buses, and beaches. His face slowly became more familiar, and I began to crave sleep just to see him again.

My friends called it a fantasy. "Your brain’s just playing tricks on you," they said, laughing. "Maybe it’s your subconscious type.”

But I wasn’t convinced.

I started sketching him. I’m no artist, but I wanted to capture the sharp curve of his jaw, the kindness in his eyes, the birthmark just under his left ear that I swore I saw in one of the dreams. He felt too real to be fiction.

Then one rainy Thursday afternoon, everything changed.

I had taken the day off work and wandered into a little bookstore tucked between two cafés on a side street I never noticed before. The bell above the door jingled, and the smell of coffee, old paper, and cinnamon greeted me.

And then I saw him.

Standing by the travel section, flipping through a book about lakes in Northern Europe, was him.

I froze. My breath caught in my throat. He looked up and our eyes locked. Time didn’t stop—it collapsed. The entire world narrowed down to the space between us. And just like in the dreams, he smiled.

“Hi,” he said, casually, as if we were old friends reunited. “Have we met before?”

I must’ve looked insane, standing there wide-eyed and shaking. “No,” I whispered, “but I’ve seen you… in my dreams.”

He laughed, but it wasn’t mocking. It was gentle. “Me too,” he said.

I blinked. “What?”

He tucked the book under his arm and walked closer. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve been dreaming of someone who looks exactly like you for months.”

I don’t know how long we stood there, staring at each other in disbelief. We sat down in the café next door and talked for hours—about our dreams, our lives, our favorite books, how we both had an odd craving for strawberry ice cream at 2 a.m., and how we each had the exact same recurring nightmare as children: a hallway with no doors, only mirrors.

He told me his name was Rayan. He lived in the same city as me but on the other side, which explained why we never crossed paths—until that day.

We both admitted it: we had told no one about the dreams because we were afraid people would call us crazy.

But here we were.

Together.

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That was a year ago.

Since then, we’ve made a tradition of writing down our dreams every morning and reading them aloud to each other on Sundays. Some are wild and make no sense. Others are strangely similar.

A few weeks ago, he proposed. Not in a dream. In real life. On the edge of a lake that looked eerily like the one from the very first dream. As he slid the ring onto my finger, he whispered, “I think I found you in every life. This time, I just remembered.”

We don’t know what to call it. Destiny? A glitch in the matrix? Reincarnation? A shared imagination?

All I know is, I once met a stranger in a dream—and now I wake up every morning beside him.

And that feels like the realest thing in the world.

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