Missing a friend I met in a dream..how to meet him again?

I have been having very vivid dreams lately about places and people. The places are new and the people are new but I feel as if I have been there before as if my dream world is a real place I travel to. I become emotionally attached to the experiences I have and the people I encounter. I remember great details like numbers such as the person’s age, what their parents do for a living, how many hours an activity was that we were doing, how much something costs in the store we both visited and so on and so forth. It’s a familiar feeling that I cannot explain and it has gone on for my entire life. My dream last night was amazing and in that dream I made a friend that was different than everyone else in his world. He was cognitively slower than others it seemed, but I became his friend and after getting to know him found out he was actually smarter than he appeared and nobody gave him the chance to prove himself like I ended up doing. He was 39 years old and was ill as in his disease would be killing him soon. We had so much fun and I found out from the parents at the end of the dream about his death being around the corner. There are so many other details I am leaving out because the length of the story would be way too long. I have had a lucid dream in the past but when I realized I was having a lucid dream it woke me up out of excitement. Grrr! How can I be sure to go back to the same place when I sleep again tonight? I could definitely use advice. Thank you all so much, and sorry if this doesn’t make sense to some of you. :\

hmmm you might want to try a thing like dream directing. It’s a lot like MILD, but in its place you want to focus on the character, the place, etc. The main thing is you want the last thoughts in your sleepy mind to be what you hope to dream about. This might work even better if you wake up, or wake yourself up in the middle of the night to try again, because your brain will slip into the deeper stages of sleep faster.

You could also double up and try positive affirmations too. Before going to sleep repeat in your head, or better yet write it down on a sheet of paper: I WILL dream about ______. This works as a kind of self hypnotic suggestion. Its worked in a roundabout sense for me in the past, but i’m no pro.

Good luck!