Here's how it works: I'll not be thinking, even remotely, about a certain person.  I mean, she doesn't even exist I'm so not thinking about her.  And then, out of nowhere, I'll have a really vivid dream about her.  Nothing extraordinary, typically.  Normally just a dream where we're talking, doing something mundane.  Hanging out.  Sometimes more; recently I had one where I tried to decide between this person and my current life, which, in the dream, was a cloistered sort of insane life spent grinding metal to metal dust, which was used to create new dies to grind back to dust. I normally wake up puzzled.

Then, and this always happens, I get an email from said person later that day.  In real life.  Seriously, every single time.  That very day.  I get an email, previous one was "I'm in China!" and this latest one was a very short "are you still alive?" message.

This same sort of thing happens with certain other events in my life.  I'll dream about a thing, a completed thing.  Say, some project.  A physical project, like making a tube amp or remodeling the bathroom.  The actual subject of the dream is something different, something else.  But in it, there's this complete thing.  And it always either matches the eventual project, or helps me guide it to completion in some way.

It's, I'm pretty sure, some sort of selective memory and / or a subconscious guidance.  I see a glowing, warm tube amp in a dream and complete one that I've been working on using ideas gained from the dream...so it's really just an imaginative problem solving method.

It sucks when the subject of the dream is work.  I spend a lot of time, a whole lot of time, dreaming about work.  I work all day, then I'm here all night, working.

Stupid brain.

I could get all sorts of metaphysical, though, what with the way my head works vis a vis dreaming.  Thankfully I'm not prone to fits.  I don't believe in visions.  Necessarily.  I do occasionally ponder the perceptual equivalent of quantum physics, the sort of cutting edge phenomenology that makes smart people sound like mystics or makes them seem crazy.  Simulation theory, Jungian universal minds, external thought, delayed reality, infinite life....those sorts of crazy things.  They can be a fun diversion.

My second stepmother, she was a full on whack job.  Had visions and would act on them.  She had this sort of waking nightmare once where she saw, perfectly, her chest crushed by the steering wheel of her car, her daughters bloody and broken in a car accident.  This happened while she was driving.  She was with her mom and sister and her kids.  They all looked at each other, and simultaneously said "Let's not take Scenic Rd" or whatever route they were on.  She hung a sort of emergency left turn, and they all breathed a sigh of relief.  Her mom and her sister both had the same "vision."  They compared details.  They probably fed one another's hysteria.  In the end, they avoided an accident that, we found out later, killed six people. Some out-of-control pickup truck driving head-on into a car.

I believe in chaos.  I mean, I understand that things trend toward chaos.  That math has a hard time explaining some of the fractal edges of this is understandable, but somewhere there's an explanation for that sort of behavior.  In the meantime, it's a very neat place to spend your day, screwing with your reality.