Things You Find in Dreams

I always have crazy detailed dreams.
Because I'm moving into a new place next month, I've been having lots of dreams about architectural designs and stuff. Like 2 nights ago, I dreamt my studio apartment was a crazy loft apartment with laundry machines and a bar.
Last night, I kept waking up intermittently, dreaming of really strange, fictional things. Like a toilet, that looked like a race car bed.
The last segment of my dream, right now, around 7:30-8:00 EST was especially worth noting. Me and my fiance were running around our new place, checking out stuff the old tenants had left behind for us. Odds and ends of things were painted in bright colors with arcylic paints - much like my older sister likes to do to furniture, and we kept using her name as a verb. 
I was in the bathroom, and there were these set of arcylicly painted teal doors, with a sliding lock across the front of them. The bathroom was huge by the way. I slide the lock open, and behind the bathroom was a walk-in powder room/closet thing. It wasn't a very big room, - the length of the bathroom, but just the width of maybe 4 feet or less. To my right was a tall and narrow chest of drawers, painted hunter greenish. Along the backwall of the powerroom was a low dresser with the top/counter painter lime green. Various drawers had been pulled our from both and where stacked around the room. Above the teal doors that lead to this room were shelves with coat racks.
I thought the low dresser would be great, because that means my fiance might not need to bring his dresser from own when we move in - or maybe we'll keep thing one as a spare. I shut the teal doors, attempted to lock myself in from the inside, and started shouting his name, trying to create a game of hide and go seek. He came, I opened the doors for him, but just them, something at the top of the stairs erupted in loud noises.
Our dog (a black lab) was barking and someone was here. We both go to see. Right outside the bathroom was a flight of stairs that lead to a landing that led to our front door. Our driveway pulled right up to that door. My brother was coming in the door and up the stairs with our other dog, a white bulldogish thing that kept howling like mad. My brother placed the white howling dog in my arms. I'm feeling frustrated over the crazy dogs.
As my brother goes to leave, the front door swings open, and my Papa is standing outside in our driveway. He's dressed up really fancy, in a gray suit with dress shoes, a white  dress shirt, and a black tie. His hair is neatly combed, and he has his sunglasses or his tinted glasses on. Apparently he was getting ready to go out on a date.
"How are you doing Papa?" I call.
"I'm still doing alright," he replies in his gruff, nonchalent, happy tone.
I nod, satisfied. My brother and my Papa head out.
Me, my fiance, and the dogs continue exploring the new place.
From there, we wandered into the bedroom, looked at the low ikea like bed frame, and the popsicle-stick like night tables and magazine racks that were left behind that were painted a dark cobalt blue.
And then I wake up.
In the first few seconds, my immediately thoughts are to the teal doors and the cool, hidden, secret power room. However, there is no power room like that in the new place, and both of our real bathrooms are pretty small. Ah well, it was still a cool dream.
I'm thinking about the architectural elements a bit more, when the image of Papa comes back to me. Wow. That's unusual.
I dream about pets that are no longer here all the time. It's not a bit deal, it's just more like a memory. I dream in the past a lot, of my high school classmates who all still look 18 or 17. When I dream of deceased pets, it's not eerie, it's pretty typical. My black lab has been in my dreams in an non-grief like way, a lot, and probably always will. My childhood dog is still in dreams from time to time.
But, this is the first time a deceased person has ever been in a dream I've remembered. Papa was so calm and normal that it didn't even seem strange to me. It wasn't the element that made me wake up, and when I woke up, I was first thinking of other things.
But that image of him is so clear. And what he had to say was so interesting. "I'm still doing alright" I repeated it out loud over and over until I got everything typed out. I didn't want to accidentally shorten it to "I'm still alright"
My imagination is pretty powerful. I can think of the strangest things. For example, the 3:30-4:00am segment of my dream was finding my fiance had drank Indian Pale Ale in my bathroom, then filled the sink with mittens and radio wouldn't stop playing Cat Stevens, "Wild World." The 6-7 segment of my dream included riding a train in the dark. I come up with weird stuff.
But having Papa in my dream was so interesting, and almost not strange enough for my typical dream. I don't believe in an afterlife. I believe that our psychological subconscious can bring about ideas that are important to us in our sleep. On a logical, scientific bases, I would have to conclude that this was caused by nothing more than my mind and my memories.
But that's why I'm agnostic and not a pure atheist. As an agnostic, I'm really not sure, and I'm willing to leave the door open to possibilities that are beyond science's explanations. Even though it's not plausible, I will admit that just about anything is possible.
So who knows why I dreamt of my Papa. But it was cool.