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After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter.
Revelation 4:1

Portals are spiritual gateways through which man interfaces with the supernatural. For a believer, via a spiritual portal, he is given access to a spiritual reality in other to deploy same on the earth in fulfilling the counsel of God.
It is the Lord that initiates the opening of portals, with the cooperation of man. Man also has a part to play.
James the beloved was brother to James the great. The churches of Smyrna, Pergamos, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicia and Thyatira were founded by him. From Ephesus he was ordered to be sent to Rome, where it is affirmed he was cast into a cauldron of boiling oil. He escaped by a miracle without injury. Domitian afterwards banished him into the Island of Patmos, where he wrote the Book of Revelation. Nerva, the successor of Domitian recalled him. He was the only Apostle who escaped a violent death.

A portal of Revelation opened up for him in that Island.
I believe John was a person of intimacy with the Lord. An Island is always a place of seclusion, isolation and solitude. It was in this condition he had a visitation.
I personally believe that as believers consecrate themselves to seek the Lord, as we are constant in the place of intimacy and fellowship, yearning for the Lord and desiring that His will be done, we will have the supernatural open up to us. Spiritual things happens only in response to a demand.
Newton third law of motion states; Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Such parallel exists in the spiritual. Any reaction you see in the spirit, it had been provoked by a commesurate action in the physical. Revival is a response to man's cry to God. There can be no downpour without first an evaporation.
In the case of Jacob in Genesis 28:12-17, the place where he had that encounter was the place of the altar, a place of fellowship where his forefather had called upon the name of the Lord. A portal already existed there. By divine arrangement God made him stumble into the atmosphere that had already been created years ago before he was born. He came into that concentration and he had that encounter.

And he removed from thence unto a mountain on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, having Bethel on the west and Hai on the east: and there he builded an altar unto the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord.
Genesis 12:8

This is where Jacob had the encounter, where he experienced an open portal. A place where Abraham had called upon the name of the Lord.
So, portals always open up in places of high spiritual activity as men seek the face of the Lord or as people come into the atmosphere or circumference where God had made covenants with men, they can experience portals that had already existed as they align themselves and are sensitive.

Conclusively, we must understand that believers in the new testament have been given access(Ephesians 2:18). But we can begin to come into certain manifestations or experience as we seek the Lord and His agenda or as we align ourselves with a spiritual portal already existing.
Sometimes, in certain cases, under certain conditions, it is wise to align ourselves with something the Lord had already began to do, it will save us a lot of energy and time.