I dont really have like educational insight except to say i get this stuff all the time- pretty cool!. I will say that the more in tune you are with your body/ feelings and more self aware/ less repressed, the more that “ability” will develop. Your dreams are usually trying to tell you something on a subconcious level.. the more you trust your gut instincts about people and situations, the stronger this will get. Good pratice is just looking at pictures of people, art, or whatever and writting down what comes to mind, what feelings you get in association, and what bodily instincts you get in response. So as an empath you can hear someones story and maybe you’ll get a feeling of tightness in your chest or feel like you need to protect yourself/crawl into a ball and you might begin to feel what they are/ know whats happening below the surface, just an example and sounds silly, but thats sortof where it starts.
As far as dreams and premonitions, write them down. Extract the baseline feelings from the dream and see what it might be telling you. I think our dreams are important psychologically but also probably in a psychic way. If you have a gut feeling something is up with your friend, and start having dreams about protecting her, it could be your own ability/ the universe’s ways of telling you to pay attention to those feelings. You know?