You've Seen Things, Haven't You?

My name is Katie, I'm 21, live in Chicagoland

My story might be a bit confusing, since there's a lot of different things I'm going to try to cover. I'm new to this site and would just like some input from anyone who's experienced anything similar to the things I have. Basically I've had so many varied experiences I'm just trying to figure out if it's normal, and if any of these things have anything to do with each other, like are these sort of things a package deal? I'll try to do this in chronological order and go back as early as I remember experiencing anything out of the ordinary up to the most recent. I don't want to make this too long so I'll just post the most relevant stories that stick with me or bother me the most.

The earliest thing I remember would only happen if I was alone at my house. Two walls are pretty much all windows, and sometimes I would see a big black "thing" run across my yard really fast, and I'd look and sometimes catch it running away, and sometimes it was just out of the corner of my eye. From what I remember and could see since it would always happen so fast, was it looking like a dog of some sort, but extremely bigger than any dog I've ever seen. I was around 8-10 years old when it happened the most frequently.

When I was 9 my family had to get my cat put to sleep the day after Christmas. At the time it was extremely traumatic and I was depressed for a few weeks. A few nights later I woke up in the middle of the night and heard a cat's meow coming from under my bed. I got up and looked under the bed and saw my dead cat staring back at me with his green eyes. I was pretty scared at the time because it didn't make sense to me, and freaked me out so bad I tried to convince myself it was a dream the next day. From that point on nothing really out of the ordinary happened until I was a few years older [teenager].

I'd say I was 15 at the time when I was laying in my bed with the headphones on trying to fall asleep. About 2 or 3 songs passed and I got this really creepy feeling like someone was standing next to my bed looming over me, and at the same time the music started to get gradually really quiet, like it was fading away or something. I was so sure there was something there I opened my eyes to look and I saw a dark shadowy figure of a woman's face with just black circles for eyes and a mouth and it zoomed in toward me and disappeared like it went through me or something. Immediately the music went back to normal and the sinking uneasy feeling went away, but needless to say I was too scared to try to go back to sleep or put the headphones back on for that matter.

About a year later I was at my friends house sitting in the kitchen, we were across from each other having a conversation when in the hallway next to me I noticed something move. I looked to my right and saw the image of a woman peeking around the doorway and looked straight at me. I stopped what I was saying and my friend just said "oh my god. What? What?" Before I could say anything it disappeared. I couldn't tell if she was elderly or just sickly but she looked unhealthy and unhappy. My friend stef said she saw the look on my face change and that my "face went white". All I said was "we need to get the **** outta here right now." I didn't want to even tell her what I saw until she came outside with me because I knew it would scare her half to death and the hallway to the front door just happened to be where I spotted the "thing"

The only thing that makes me feel not crazy is all the other things that happened in that house with or without me there. To make it short, my friend and her sister have heard voices, came across objects having been moved or thrown all over the room, and also heard growling. They no longer live there but the people her family sold the house to just rented it out on the weekends for parties. Since no one was living in it me and stef and a couple other people thought it would be fun to "ghost hunt" or whatever and see if anything else would happen if we went back to the house. We snuck in and each went in different rooms alone and just waited. One of my friends was upstairs, one in the living room, one in the basement, and I was in the kitchen sitting on the counter. I sat there for about 10 minutes when a wine glass sitting on the other side of the counter flew towards me into the sink. After the shock wore off I jumped off the counter and ran into the living room and told my friend what just happened. No one believed me since nothing weird happened to any of them.

Now onto the dreams. I'm not sure if any of this is related but here goes. I don't know much about prophetic dreams or precognition but I don't know what else to call this. I've had a few dreams that later came true.

One dream was me driving through a town I've never been to before, but at the same time looked familiar. There were tornadoes everywhere and it was just me trying to drive away from them. I woke up just thinking it was another weird pointless dream until about 6 months later I was driving my friend to her boyfriend's house she just started seeing. When we got closer into town it hit me. I started seeing roads and landmarks from my dream. I told her "I've totally seen this place before in a dream, but there were tornadoes!" My friends are used to hearing stuff like this from me so they didn't seem to care too much. This was around Halloween 07. Later that December, there was a day it warmed up outta nowhere to almost 70 degrees. I was in Wisconsin at my friends house at the time and left because it looked like a storm was heading in. Later that evening she called me and said tornadoes came through a few miles over in the next town. I turned on the news and found out there were also tornadoes in the same town in Illinois from my dream I was at 2 months prior.

Another one I can remember was when my mom lost something very important to her. No one in the house knew where it was for days. One night I dreamed I was rummaging around in her room on top of her sewing machine and found it under a bunch of papers and things. The next day just for the hell of it I looked in the same place and sure enough it was there. If you're wondering what this item is let's just call it a tobacco pipe.

The most recent one was a series of dreams I had about a guy I was seeing and my best friend. In my first dream I walked into my room to find them both lying in my bed. In the second I chased her out of my bed and into my back yard demanding she tell me what was going on. The third dream her and my other friend were sitting at a table and talking about me as I walked up and joined them and then just didn't say anything at all. About a month later I found out he was dating her the whole time he was seeing me, and they both lied to me about it as well as my other friend [who was talking to her in my dream] that knew the whole time. The only way I even found out about this is by grilling people because I figured if the dreams didn't stop there had to be something going on. You could imagine I didn't want to just come out and say "hey I've been having these dreams, is it true?" I figured it sounded crazy, but hey, I was right.

This is getting really long so I'll just end it with the trip I took last summer to a psychic medium. It was at a renaissance faire and this guy supposedly had a pretty impressive resume. He had worked on police cases in Texas and what-not. The second I sat down in the chair he said "you've seen things haven't you?" and "you want to know about your dreams"...he told me I was gifted and not to be scared of any of it [which I still am by the way] and gave me a list of books to read to "hone my abilities" and such.

So what should I think about all this?