"Dreams are weird and stupid and they scare me."

From Rose Walker's diary, in SANDMAN #16: "Lost Hearts"

My lord Morpheus has been messing with my head recently. For what felt like months I didn't dream at all; or what dreams I did have were fairly mundane--driving to the airport, washing my clothes, writing a paper--nothing in the least surreal about them, and I'd forget them as soon as I awoke.
But now I'm having terribly vivid, very wierd dreams. Flying dreams, and dreams about sunsets and lakes that I can't swim across, wandering around endless passages in a kind of hospital/school cafeteria building. I dreamed I ran into the girl I briefly went out with last month, one of those awkward meetings after a messy break-up, and we talked about something I don't remember, she walked away, turned around, came back and kissed me, and then disappeared. Which unnerved me a bit.
But last night's dream was really wierd, even by those standards. I dreamed about Neil Gaiman. He was sitting on my porch, writing his novel, and we hung out and talked about whatever it is you talk about in dreams, and he was just as nice and charming as he seems to be on his blog. And then he asked me if we had any marbles in the house. It was for his book. We used to have an old mason jar full of old-fashioned glass marbles that my mother and aunts and uncles played with when they were kids in the 50s, and we spent the rest of the dream, Neil Gaiman and I, in the basement, looking for these glass marbles. We never did find them.
Now that, dear reader, is just odd. When I dream about real people it's always people I know; and certainly not authors I've never met. (Why can't I have a dream about Jane Austen? That would be fun. We'd sit and have tea and trade snarky gossip about the neighbors). The only other vaguely literary dream I remember having was about David Copperfield (the Dickens character, not the magician). I was very mad at him for treating poor Agnes Wickfield so badly, I was yelling at him and demanded he give her money.
Maybe I should pay attention to what I eat before I go to bed....

Oho, my sainted aunt, have I become a victim of brain fever, the curse of academia...?

Jonathan Crane, in SANDMAN #7: "Sound and Fury"