Hi OOBDude-
Juditha's method is practical, effective and will work for you if you use it.
However, for the stuff that seems to have slipped by, there is little to be done except to understand its nature. To explain, I'm gonna get wordy, but have patience.
Imagine a river. It flows from Here to There, and it has banks. The river is a dynamic system that responds to its circumstances without going through lots of thinking and internal discussion. It comes to a rock and pushes or dissolves or whatever, and just goes on. Then as the seasons change, different amounts of water come, a dry spell might pass, and so on. Each of those alters the flow, changing the banks and the channel. In this way, the river bed comes to be a sort of "physical memory" for the past events experienced by the river. This "physical memory actually contains a lot of information, and it directs the passage of the river accordingly, followig the ways of least resistance and greatest ease of flow, but without the need for the river to think about it or figure anything out.(Actually, I'd be interested in talking with a river spirit one day to check this out in person.)
Now go back to your dream. This was a series of events through which your awareness has passed. Evidently your waking mind lacks the symbolic mechanisms to decode or store the information. On the other hand, it remains with you as part of the "river banks of experience" that channel your life. For you to acess this information it must have three aspects: (1) a process or dynamic, like the experience of presentation; (2) a substantive nature, the actual information content, often abstract in nature; (3) a relational nature through which the dynamic presents to you the substantive content in a manner that allows you to integrate it as part of your definition of self.
What you got was only one aspect - the dynamic experience. It's still there, a kink in the river banks, acting as a sort of abstract tendency toward realization, and it is slowly manifesting the substantive content by building relationships within your psyche. When this process completes, you'll have the entire message.
This is essentially the same manner of developing ideas that is used in growth oriented analytic psychotherapy, and is nothing especially new. It's the same process as when you hint to your SO that you'd like a little affection, and the process sort of regeneratively expands into making love without any specific planning. Viewed in that way, you've gotten a hint from the spirit world about something that will develop in its own good time. Like your friend said, it brings change, and as you observed, it seems to be important.
So, in a word, ENJOY!

PUL
dave
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