Today, I woke from sleep dreaming of friends I have met  on the internet.  

In my dream, they'd come to visit me and my family.  We've never actually met in real life.  However, I was struck in the dream with the difficulty of actually getting to know them, 
because their personalities were so different in real life to the way they express them on the net, and I was also struck with the realisation that they felt the same way about me. 

When I 'talk' on the net, it is my inner mind and feelings that are expressed.  Not many people actually see those aspects of me on a daily basis. The outward expression of my personality changes according to the circumstances I find myself in.  When I've got work to do, I'm serious and matter-of-fact.  When I'm on holiday, I'm eager to be active and explore things.  When I am tired, I'm cranky and irritable.  When I meet people, I'm bawdy, loud, smiling, and a hail-fellow-well-met character. 

As an astrologer, I can understand all these facets of people's personalities as the zodiac houses in which their planets are being expressed.  For instance, everyone seems to know their Sun sign.  Mine's Leo, and my Sun lies in my 10th house.  The Sun sign expresses the nature that you present to people  after you've been introduced and are getting to know them.  But there are lots of other planets, e.g. Mercury shows how you behave mentally; the Moon shows how you behave emotionally.  But, for people who don't have psychological insight or, like me, an astrological background, it can be perplexing to see the personality changes in people in differing situations.  They might even suspect that someone was not really who they were presenting themselves to be.  

I know, I've had difficulty with others who  have thought this of me, and I had no hope in hell of trying to explain, because it only made them more certain I had something to hide. 

On the internet, I express my mental Mercury, and my emotional Moon.  How could you express anything else, here?  It's the same with letter writing.  People get into the real you through letters.  If you find it hard to write, then you may also have a difficulty expressing your deeper emotions.  I don't.  Thoughts and feelings come easily to me, and flow easily.  But, in daily life, these are not always visible to others.  On the internet, through writing, I have a direct connection to these facets of myself, and anyone reading what I write also has a direct connection to these deeper aspects of me.  So, you tend to get very intimate, very fast.  Especially in my case. 

That's not a normal thing to do in real life.  We usually go through phases of
getting to know people well before we let them into those very intimate aspects of ourselves.  So, you can see how weird it might seem to others that  suddenly you appear to not be the person you've been expressing yourself as.  

The person I present myself as on the internet is me.  But it's my intimate side, my deeper side, and my deepest thoughts and feelings.  Maybe not everyone expresses themselves like that on the internet.  As an astrologer, I could look at their charts and find out how they would; but, for me, this is the way I express.  I suppose that comes naturally to me
since I just love writing, and I have a powerful imagination.  Just check out my creative writing to see what I mean... 

My dream showed me the difficulty I might face if ever I met my internet friends.  That the natural tendencies I have when meeting 'new' people would come to the fore and make me an enigma to them; and, as well, their natural tendencies for reticence and reserve in such situations might stem the easy flow of communication we'd previously had on the internet. I hope that, if I ever do meet them, we can work through such early phases quickly. I'd like to think that the intimacy we'd previously established will be found real enough to develop a deep and lasting friendship on all levels of our lives and in all expressions.  With loved ones and best friends, that is usually what happens in the end.