I am a woman. I dreamed that I was a man standing in a gay…

Were you attracted to the man in the chocolate brown pinstriped suit? Sounds like you were, and because he is wearing very dark clothes except for a bright red tie, he is a shadow manfriend who represents much of what attracts you to men the most: being older, perhaps old enough to be a father, military of high rank, diamondstudded black vest like the deep night sky, and flaming-excited phallic tie, right by the FirePlace of sexual excitement, and ready to drink alcohol, which you've also never tried, so it could actually function the way it has for many men and women throughout history, as the sedative that puts their social conscience to sleep and releases their sexual urges from the confinement of their conscious vow.

Gay men are also believed by many other people to live out their sexual urges as a way of life, completely opposite to your vow of chastity. Consciously you write that leaving your virginity behind might never happen, which is a radical denial of your genital arousal, so the dream shows you how it would play out if you gave in to your arousal instead of denying it.

"They must have hurt me because I was suddenly "waking up", naken in a tub of water." You're waking up to your sexual arousal. And the tub of water represents the bath that is the place where male and female parts of oneself unite (as pictured in the tradition of Alchemy that is actually about male and female psychospiritual development). Your dream-ego-character doesn't find the gay sex-partner's face attractive--and that makes good psychological sense, because male genitals are normally not very attractive to women, especially when a virginal woman does not want to see them and does not want to learn to find them attractive, because she consciously does not want to be attracted to a sex act she's not at all sure she will ever want to participate in or enjoy.

You feel guilty about wanting to have sex, and you have to find yourself being a gay man (because you still felt attracted to the chocolate-suited starry-night fireplace man when you became him) because you can still deny that your feminine self is actually pursuing your genital arousal and taking the lead in making sure he has sex with you. "Then I thought, he doesn't mind anyway." So you finally absolved yourself of committing an unwanted sexual act toward another person.

Now what does the dream mean? Well, you're enacting the sexual completion that your conscious virginal mind denies to you that you even want. But the "gay male" side of you (that is the sexually assertive side that is nevertheless attracted only to men) doesn't mind, so you're not committing a crime Against Your Humanity or anyone else's.

The symbol of the male and female king&queen together in the bath, who are actually melting down into one being that is simultaneously male and female, is the alchemical image of the union of male & female in one person. And this kind of union is more possible In One Person when that person is a Virgin, as you are. Several of the Greek goddesses were virgins because there are very valuable spiritual and worldly things we can do when we are not having to respond to another person's demands on our time and our body and emotions. You can read about these goddesses, Athena, Artemis, and Hestia, in Goddesses in Every Woman by Jean Shinoda Bolen. And nuns have always been Virgins who are symbolically married to the Church or to Christ. If you realize that in your dream you are not becoming sexually aroused with a living man, but rather heating up your chemistry with a heavenly man, whose main purpose is to inspire you to develop your own creativity and spiritual growth. The majority of women who have done great things of a creative, prosocial and spiritual nature in many societies have been women who developed their creative abilities and spiritual character while staying Virgins, so they didn't use up their creative&sexual energy dealing with a man until later--or in some cases not at all. Love is a wonderful force, and if it is channeled into your own personal psychospiritual growth and your own creativity INSTEAD of into working on a relationship with a male (who typically doesn't control his sexual energy as well as a woman can, so she's pursued and having to defend herself) you'll develop a higher sense of yourself and perhaps also a greater ability to utilize both male and female sides of your own personality and less unconscious dependence on a male who later becomes your partner.

So on one hand your dream could be read to imply that you're denying your sexual energy while awake, so it bursts forth completely out of control in your dream! But that neglects the fact that Dreaming Reality is Symbolic, and that's Different from the Real World. Your sexual energy is doing just fine when you let it unite you as female with your male side in the symbolic scene in your dreams. For your waking ego is where your morality resides and your morality has no intention of doing in reality what your dreaming self can do in a dream. The union of your male and female energies in your unconscious is what gives birth to creative products (what earthly-married people would call "children") and creative additions to your personality. So you can give yourself to your sexual union in your dream bath. That is also what the "fireplace" in scene one turned into, right? At least the water was warm, or you warmed it up from your own central "fireplace."

Your virginal dream belongs to a class of dreams and spiritual experiences that some young adults have some time between the ages of 15 and 24 -- or later -- that is an experiential preview of the world of high spiritual/religious development. It is a vision of enlightenment and sainthood BEFORE you get fully involved with the ordinary adult world of work, love and family-forming, like Siddhartha in Herman Hesse's book by that name about the early life of Buddha.

I highly encourage you to give expression to your creativity, to preserve your virginity for as long as you feel it. To respect any fears you feel about boyfriends and sex, because going over that edge of your presexual paradise SHOULD be very scary, and you should make sure you don't let anybody get power over you that doesn't respect your virginity as much as you do.

I was afraid for my virginity in my young adulthood, and I was a boy, and also not gay. A young man who's afraid of jumping into sex (including by using alcohol as an anaesthetic to disable the fear) is a good bet as a companion, because even if he doesn't understand it, he has respect for his virginity as you do for yours.

Feel free to ask anything you want. And thank you for a splendid dream-vision of the wholeness of each one of us during the time in our lives when we have sexual energy but we haven't yet devoted it to earthly actions, so its heavenly uplifting power is still active in our unconscious minds.