It's not uncommon at all to dream of pets that have passed away, even years afterwards. Most likely something recently made you think about it, but possibly only very subliminally. It might not even be that you thought about it while awake, but maybe a dream just sort of randomly led to it. Dreams progress according to something called dream schema, meaning one idea leads to another in a sort of chain of causation. The example given in Stephen LaBerge's book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming is that you might dream about being on a dark street, which seems scary, so that sets off a frightening schema. This causes your mind to come up with something scary, say a dark figure that you glimpse across the street coming toward you. That then kicks off a chase segment, where you're trying to get away but he's always just behind you, no matter where you go.
Some chain of dream events might have simply led up to you dreaming about one of the cats or both of them, which kicked off the schema of the death and disappearance. Then that just led naturally to thinking about the cat you want in the future, so in it popped into your dream.
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