Do You Dream About Your Characters?

I woke up this morning in the midst of a dream about two of my characters. In that sleepy, dreamy state, they were so vivid and real, and it left me energized and invigorated to go and write an awesome scene about them.

This got me to thinking...dreaming about my characters and stories, or waking up thinking about them, is not an unusual thing for me. In fact, I'd say it's a necessary part of the process, as it helps to make everything in my story more vivid to me. It helps me to feel like my story and characters matter. But it never seems to happen easily. Not until I'm fully engrossed in the book I'm working on. In my world, it's kind of a circular problem: I don't dream until I'm engrossed, but I NEED the dreams to really make me engrossed. So I'm not quite sure how I've found myself here again...dreaming, adoring my story and characters, overwhelmed with new and exciting scene ideas. But I am. And I'm thankful for that.

Sometimes, I admit, I wake up in the middle of the night with the strangest ideas (and think they're awesome at the time). Of course, by morning I usually know that I won't be making my main character into a man eating shark and sending her off to bite the head off the antagonist in my contemporary realistic YA.  Usually I know that. Sometimes my critique partner needs to bring me back to earth.

Do you dream about your characters and stories? Do they become more real to you that way, like they do for me? Do you find the weirdozoid ideas creep out in the middle of the night, but the good ones come in the morning?