Modern Romance with Realism

It started, oddly enough, with a dream.

I was standing in the middle of an empty train station — not one I recognized, but it felt oddly familiar. The air was thick with fog, the kind that glowed under orange street lamps. And then she appeared. She walked out of the mist, wearing a navy-blue coat and carrying a sketchbook. Her eyes locked with mine like we already knew each other. We didn’t speak. We just smiled and sat side-by-side on the bench, like we’d done it a thousand times before.

I woke up feeling the warmth of that connection in my chest. It was so vivid that I sat up and jotted it down in my notes app: Girl. Blue coat. Train station. Dream felt real.

I thought that was the end of it.

Two weeks later, I matched with someone on a dating app. Her profile wasn’t overly detailed—some candid photos, a line about her love for books and drawing, and a quote from Inception: "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling." It made me pause. There was something eerily familiar.

Her name was Elise. We started chatting. Her messages were warm and full of quirky humor, but there was something deeper too, like we were skipping the awkward small talk and heading straight into knowing each other.

Then one evening, she sent me a random message: “Do you ever dream about people you’ve never met?”

My heart stopped. I didn’t know how to respond. I typed, deleted, and retyped. Finally, I replied: “Yes. I had a dream about someone a few weeks ago. She had a blue coat and a sketchbook. We met at a train station.”

Her reply came within seconds. “Stop. I had the SAME dream. You were there too.”

We both sent voice notes, laughing nervously, trying to rationalize it. “Maybe it’s some weird manifestation,” she said. “Maybe we’re just romanticizing it.”

But neither of us could deny the feeling: we had dreamt of each other before meeting.

We met in real life the following weekend at a café downtown. When I saw her walk through the door in a navy-blue coat, my breath caught in my throat. She smiled and said, “I almost didn’t wear this… but something told me to.”

That first meeting didn’t feel like a first date. It felt like a reunion.

We talked for hours. She told me about her art, how she sketched places from her dreams. I told her about my habit of recording dreams and writing them down. We shared journals and doodles, discovering more overlaps: locations, symbols, even phrases we both remembered from dreams we’d never spoken about before.

Over time, the dream faded into the background of our growing reality. But it never completely left us. Every now and then, we’d dream together again. The train station returned once. Another time, we both described walking through a lavender field under stars.

We tried to be logical about it. Maybe our subconscious minds were filling in gaps. Maybe it was suggestibility or coincidence. But logic couldn’t explain everything.

We weren’t perfect—no couple is. We argued about silly things, like text response times or weekend plans. But something about our foundation always brought us back. There was a quiet belief between us that we were meant to meet. Whether it was fate, the universe, or just a lucky algorithm, we felt chosen.

One year after our first message, we went back to that café. Elise brought a small wrapped box.

Inside was a sketchbook.

She had drawn every dream we had ever shared — the station, the field, even a strange underwater library we both remembered but never understood. On the last page, she had written: “We met before we met. And I’d choose it all again — even in another dream.”

I cried. I wasn’t the type to cry, but I did. Because somehow, I had found someone who felt like a memory before she became a moment. Someone who blurred the lines between dreams and reality.

We don’t talk about the dream too much anymore. We’re busy living. But every now and then, we wake up and look at each other with knowing eyes, and we smile. Because we know.

Some loves are made on Earth.

Others… are dreamt first.