recurring dream...

dreams are something of an enigma to me.  i am not one who generally remembers their dreams, however lately i seem to remember the racy ones.  anyway, i can't remember the last time i had a nice dream, a nightmare, and i've never had a recurring dream.  with that said, i have a high school friend who appears a couple of times a year in unrelated dreams.  he just walks through the picture, i call it a cameo.  when this happens i usually shoot him a message just to say hey. 
 

are you someone who remembers their dreams?  i have another friend who claims that they can control their dreams.  crazy, right?  but this friend swears to it.  all they have to do is think about what they want to dream about before falling asleep and somehow that is what this friend dreams about.  when this friend tells me they had a dream about me, i just reply, "you planned it."  a planned dream kind of loses its impact as opposed to an unplanned dream.

 

the other night as i was reading and getting ready to crash for the night, i got a text.  this human doesn't normally text me at this hour seeing as how this human lives on the east coast and should be sleeping.  the text simply said, "are you busy?"  being this is an unusual thing for this human i replied, "nope. what's up?"  the next line kind of surprised me, "i had a nightmare and just want to run it by you."  now there was a whole slew of texts that transpired with a ton of details that i'm not going to include, but this is what you need to know, for the past several years this human has had the same nightmare about someone close to them.  here is the gist of the nightmare:
 

i get the vision of her being trapped in a burning house and by the time i get to her it's too late and i see her burning alive.

 

what would you do if you kept having this same nightmare?  i had a couple ideas of what i would do.

• dream journal.  write the nightmare down as soon as i woke up, with as many details as possible.  my thinking is that although it may be a recurring dream there might be slight changes that you don't recall 2 hours or even 10 minutes after you wake up.  list everything i did and consumed that day.  much like a food journal, you might find patterns of consumption that trigger the dream.  write down anything strange that happened that day.  there may be no correlation to the events of the day prior to the dream other than something out of the ordinary occurs, that maybe when you look at the history will prove to be extraordinary. 
  
• talk to the subject of the dream.  when i suggested this to my friend the idea was quickly shot down.  however, i think it might be helpful.  i get that conversation would be strange and most likely extremely uncomfortable, but maybe the subject has some insight to either make sense of the dream or stop them.

 

those are really the only ideas i have and i would most likely do both of them, that is if i was intent on understanding and possibly stopping them.  do you have any suggestions?