When I was very young and didn't know any better, and during the time when the large two-dimensional pair of green eyes moved about on my wall and hid under a small bookshelf on the wall, I had a book called "The Golden Egg Book", about a rabbit and a mysterious egg. It was probably one of the more interesting books of that time relating to the illustrations and I went beyond the friendship of the rabbit and the duck when I considered that they would have babies. A very short time later, I saw the one shilling Australian postage stamp that illustrated a platypus, which was pictured in a large stamp album. We did have the actual stamp for a time.

Of course, I saw the platypus as the offspring of the rabbit and the duck from "The Golden Egg Book". It swam in my dreams as the "parents" watched from the river banks.
I learned that a platypus was a mammal (like a rabbit), a monotreme, but laid eggs (like a duck), so it all made sense...I had figured the duck was female.

Years later, at age twelve, I first dreamed of a fictional animal a few times - the "cataroo" (long before the Internet). Obviously, other people had thought of this and there are even lots of related images online, but it has a very special vindication for me, personally. In one dream, the "cataroo" was in a wicker cat cage with a rounded top, the cage facing west, near the northeast area of the living room - the small carrying cage itself and its precise appearance as in the dream being something that I had never seen or heard of. This was very precise precognition many years ahead, as my wife had one exactly like it when we got together many years later. As in the dream, the door broke off eventually.

The cage was, again, visually exact relative to my more distant future and marriage, but the rest of the precognition was a composite of other factors as it often is - my wife was breeding cats at the time I went to her, and she lived in Australia (thus the cat-kangaroo mix), which I had no real-life association with at all as a boy. This is why I have always firstly looked at dreams as a literal combination of past, present, and future (even distant future) and not symbolic in an obscure or totally unrelated sense that so-called dream dictionaries try to promote.