I dream of genie

When someone tells you, I dreamed about you, that person is essentially stealing your POV, taking you from the active I-the-Dreamer and turning you loose as You-the-Participant.  Nice as it may be to be dreamed about, it runs the risk of you having to behave not as you would or would not perform in your own dreams but rather as someone following a script written for you by someone else.

A similar dynamic emerges when you create characters, exploding exponentially before your awareness as your various creations appear within a scene, regardless of whether that scene is taking place in the immediate nowness of now or as a scene from the past, remembered in the immediate now.

You must be careful to remember and honor POV in your stories because this gives the reader cues about who is having what effects on whom.  In story, each character is experiencing his or her own dream.  A is having a rollicking good time but B in the same scene is not doing so well at all, is more than a little disturbed in fact, and C is wondering how to get rid of B in order to work some chemistry or agenda on A.

When someone asks you to smile or face the camera or look serious or look interested, said photographer is borrowing a moment of your image, recording you as you appear to him or her.  Often, when you see the photo, you will be convinced an impostor has chivvied into line ahead of you, posed as you, impersonated you.  You cannot relate to looking the way you did in that particular photo; you are intent on being someone quite other than the image.  Even when the photo stirs some positive emotion or documents you having been with a particular person and/or a particular place, you always believe you looked better, felt better, was caught off guard.

The sense of you being up and about is vital if the photo is not to seem contrived, a sham of self-conscious effect.

Sometimes, when you see photos of you and recall the incident, you sense the disparity between what you felt at the time and what emerges in the photo.  Your characters have this ongoing sense of bewilderment or control or vulnerability, which you attempt to capture by using words, gestures, attitudes; you like to imagine them being interviewed for a profile in "Talk of the Town," captured by contract writers paid a minimum of $90,000/year by The New Yorker, thus likely to show you with some agenda showing like the blue veins of bacteria in a wheel of Stilton cheese, human, in action, no time to waste, pure attitude.  The genie trying to get out of the bottle