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I find dreams both wonderful and horrifying, and sometime both at the same time. I have been having intense dreams since I was a little girl and even during my most intense bouts of insomnia there are still periods where I do sleep long enough to have a dream. 

The funny thing about dreams is that you can be devastated by the good ones as much as the bad ones and the more real and vivid they feel, the worse the damage. This morning I woke up from a dream I have had a few times before, but this time it felt so convincing the hug I experienced was still surrounding me when I woke up. 

Though I always wanted children, it never came to be for me, which I have accepted, but apparently my dreams have not. This most recent dream really messed with my emotions. And the little girl in it (who I do not recall ever meeting in real life, but was just so present it was uncanny) hugged me and called me her mother. It was, in its entirety, actually a lovely dream and not the first time I have had it, but it was the first time we got to hug and the first time I 'found' her after searching everywhere.

It really, really blows my mind the power dreams can have over us...the beautiful ones, the terrifying ones and the ones that are actually based on memory and perhaps the worst of all. It also blows my mind that more people do not talk about their dreams or at least not marvel at them more internally. I started keeping a dream journal years ago and then stopped earlier this year to see if I could "unrecall" my dreams and therefore not wake up scared sometimes. That did not work at all so I decided to go back to recording my dreams and focusing more on trying to change the outcome of them with lucid dreaming. 

Lucid dreaming does not always work (actually, it is rare that it does, for me at least) but when it does work it is truly awesome.

Here are a few links to more information about dream:
  

https://www.google.com/#q=how+to+improve+your+dream+recall

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-processes-in-the-brain-allow-you-to-remember-dreams/

I find this really intriguing since I still feel we can dream about people we have never met (or even seen) in real life. The facts seem to state otherwise (apparently the brain cannot make up faces) but I find reading about dreams to be almost as interesting as having the dreams themselves:

 http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/ask-the-experts-1-invention.html