Dreams, relationships, and how chemistry is a good metaphor

I've been having very clear dreams lately, as in the past couple weeks. By clear I mean that they are vivid, detailed, and specific. Sometimes dreams are fuzzy to the senses and to the emotions; they slip away quickly; everything is sort of vague and there doesn't seem to be much of a point to what happens.

Dreams have historically been desire-gratification to me. I would usually dream about things I wanted, and it was usually pretty obvious - nothing I didn't already know. But now things are more psychologically complex. Having a dream with a plot context, a specific climactic event, and an emotional response can really clarify where things are. You can't rationalize in your dreams.

One particular dream got me thinking deeply. It was related to relationships (pretty common; a lot of the things I want but can't control are relationship-related). I came up with a useful conclusion about my current state - but when I put it into a sentence I realized I was treating love, sex, and friendship as discrete entities with distinguishable properties. That doesn't invalidate what I came up with - this rings true with my experience - but it made me pause. Some people would dispute the very existence of "love" in that sense. Just like - my mind jumped - people dispute whether hybrid orbitals really exist, or whether d orbitals are involved in valence bonding. So the separation works for practical purposes, but probably isn't, at the most fundamental level, really how things are. Different frameworks work for different people (spectrum, Venn diagram, or separation) and different chemicals (VSEPR, valence bonding, or molecular orbitals). The psychology of relationships is just as messy as bonding theory.

And as a extensive corollary... everything is in tension between theoretical explanations and experimental evidence.