Awesome post! I, too, spent a good amount of time thinking about what my dreams might be telling me.
As for the people I saw in my dreams, according to the internet turns out that every single face we see in our dreams is of someone we saw IRL. Our brain cannot and will not create a face by itself.
As for deja vu, our brain connects two completely different situations to make them uncanny if there is a tiny string of similarity between them. It's a fight or flight feature in humans.
But what amazed me most is that our dreams are influenced by what our minds are most overburdened by - I have seen extracts of movies, games, notes, and life's lemons in my dreams depending on how the day went.

Dreams are really very interesting, thank you for sharing this post!