Dreaming in Ink

I'm interested to know if other writers ever dream about their characters, or if their characters show up as people in their dreams. Because mine never, ever do and I often wonder why.

The people we know best and spend the most time with show up in our dreams all the time. I dream about my mom, my pets, my coworkers. And yet I spend more time with the characters I'm writing about than with any real person in the world.

I used to think it's because I don't dream about fictional characters at all--but characters from TV shows or other people's books do sometimes appear in my dreams as bit players. Then I thought it might be because the characters I write are really just aspects of myself--but aren't all people in dreams just aspects of the dreamer? Now I've decided that it's a vital mental-health issue, that somewhere in my subconscious I feel the need to wall my real life self off from my fictional character selves. I suspect that's the real reason, although it feels vaguely creepy.