Now I’m almost always dreaming about people I know in my real life, probably because I see most of them for hours each day and they’re ground into my subconscious. I remember a particularly horrible one where one of the people had died some awful way…
Sometimes I hate my dreams because most of them are way too real, sometimes more real than life even when I’m fully awake. I woke up on the verge of tears after that one, because I thought they were really gone, then cried in relief when I began to realize they weren’t.
Now that my dog and bird have passed, I see them in my dreams all the time.
But I remember two very vivid things from when I was a little kid where I didn’t know the people:
One was a hugely elaborate dream that started out with me being shot, and then I wake up as a ghost and meet a bunch of other kid-ghosts that I didn’t know before. It was so weird, though, because I thought I really had died. I still remember weaking up and just laying in bed for the longest time trying to understand how I was suddenly alive “again”, and actually wondering about all those other “kids”.
The other is a dream-friend girl, Katie, and in my dreams we were best friends. She visited often enough that she started feeling real, and I’d wonder where she was when I was awake. I can still see her face, and it’s of no one I’ve ever met. And then one day she was gone and I haven’t seen her since.