Matthew McConaughey recently shared a candid account of how a “wet dream” helped him find love with his wife, Camila Alves. The 56-year-old actor opened up in his “Lyrics of Living” newsletter, sent on Friday, November 21, reflecting on his quest for the right partner in his mid-30s.
“I had met, spent time with, and seriously dated some wonderful women in my life, many of whom I am still friends with today, but ultimately they were all stops, no stays,” McConaughey wrote. “In my mid-30s, I was looking for a lifetime lover, a best friend, and a mother-to-be. I was looking for more, I was looking for the one, I was looking for her.” He added, “Then I had a wet dream.”
The Dallas Buyers Club star described the vivid vision, which featured an older version of himself sitting peacefully in a rocking chair on the front porch of his country home. In the dream, McConaughey recalled there were 22 vehicles, 22 women, and 88 children. “Each woman was serene and satisfied. Every child was smiling, laughing, and healthy.
We all knew one another very well,” he explained. McConaughey noted that while he never married any of the women in the dream, he fathered the 88 children, one for each year of his life, and they were present to celebrate his 88th birthday.
“Each mother and I shared an idyllic memory, the children roosted upon my lap. We hugged, we kissed, we laughed and joked, we cried tears of happiness.
They all gathered around me on the porch for a family photograph, and we looked toward a large-format box camera on a tripod at the top of the driveway. Three! Two! One!” he wrote, before adding, “Then I came.”
The Magic Mike star said the dream confirmed that he was “OK” and reminded him that fatherhood was an essential goal in his life. He also noted that the experience helped him accept that everything would turn out fine, even if he never married or met the right person.
“The red light vision of being a lifelong bachelor had come to me in a greenlight wet dream. It was a spiritual sign, a message to surrender, to quit trying so intentionally to find the perfect woman for me, and, rather, concede to the natural selection process of finding her, her finding me, or not,” he wrote. “So I quit looking for her.”
According to McConaughey, it wasn’t until he stopped actively searching for “The One” that he met his wife. “Then she came. Three months later, I met Camila. Twenty years later she’s still the only woman I’ve ever wanted to take on a date, sleep with, or wake up next to,” he concluded.
McConaughey and Alves, 42, began dating in 2006 and married in June 2012. The couple shares three children: son Levi, born in July 2008, daughter Vida, born in January 2010, and son Livingston, born in December 2012.