Dreams in the Early Hours

I had a strange dream last night, and I am not sure exactly what it means. I dreamt that my husband and I had bought a large family home that had been repossessed and was on large acreage. This is not something we would do, as we have built our own farmhouse and don't have specific plans to leave here. In the dream though, the house we bought had been repossessed from a large homeschooling family with eight children. They left quickly, as evidenced by tons of soft toys, dolls, dollsclothes, books, workbooks and knick-knacks everywhere. Then the home sat empty for a year while the bank had fruitlessly tried to sell it. In the dream, we bought it for very little money, and for cash in a desperately sick US economy. Although a bargain, and not an old home, it needed a great deal of cleaning, some repair, and interior painting.
In the dream, our other children were staying with friends and completing activities and school, while Daniel was with us. My husband cleaned the large master bedroom suite first,and Daniel would be staying with us in our room for a couple of days, on a large mattress made up as a bed there, so that the dust and mess would not aggravate any asthma. I got the impression that in the dream, he was about eight years old or so.
Everything in the house was locked or had unusual keys. We had not received an actual key to the house, and had been entering through a window. We had waited to call a locksmith because we believed that we would eventually find a cache of spare keys, which we eventually did. In the basement, we also found a Liberty Safe locked tightly. As we cleaned, we decided that we wanted to return all the personal possessions to the family who had lived there before. There was nothing extremely valuable that we knew of, but much of it was the type of thing that would have been important memories for the people who had made them. There were lots of hand knitted and hand crocheted clothes for bears and dolls. We decided to clean and box all the personal stuff, and try to return it all the the prior owners. I was wheezy as I cleaned out everything and put things away.
I remember feeling happy because Daniel was with us, and our other children were safe, but I was sad that another family had lost the home they had loved and had had such a high mortgage on. The more I cleaned, the more sorry I felt for them.
At that moment workers arrived to help us paint the interior of the house. They came from the area of the house. When I asked them whether they knew where the family had gone,and they said, "Down South". I told them I wanted to return their personal possessions. They told me they had never been heard from again. We resolved to keep their things in the attic for them.
I awoke to the knowledge that Daniel is not with us, in the flesh anymore, and certainly would not be around eight years old, even if he were. I was glad that my sorrow concerning a family I had never met was not real. I realized though, that if they were all together and all alive, then they were in fact more fortunate than we are just now, having Daniel away from us. I did enjoy happily tucking Daniel in, as we did when he was about that age.
I don't know if the dream acknowledges many financial losses which are occuring to families all over the US, or whether Daniel, in dreams, finds ways of spending time with us both. Oddly, my husband dreamt about him also last night also. In my husband's dream, Daniel was sitting in a high chair talking to us.
It's hard to know sometimes, what is a tired brain talking, and what is prophetic in some way.
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Incidentally, the house pictured above is not the house in the dream, but the picture represents well the "nook and cranny" nature and feel of house that was in my dream.
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