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Repetitive dreams about the same unknown person usually reflect something your unconscious mind is processing, not necessarily that this person exists in reality. It could be an aspect of yourself that you don't consciously recognize, a characteristic or emotion that this figure represents, or simply your brain reorganizing information while you sleep. Sometimes it's pure chance: your mind generates faces and if one repeats a couple of times, we start reading meaning into it.
What matters is paying attention to how you feel in those dreams and what that person does. Does it make you anxious, curious, comfortable? Do they talk, chase you, just exist there? Those details say more than the person themselves. For example, if they represent a sense of threat, maybe there's something in your waking life that worries you without you recognizing it. If they create a sense of calm, maybe your mind is seeking that kind of presence.
It's not worth obsessing over interpreting every detail as a cosmic message. Dreams are mostly neural noise with patterns our brain constructs into narratives. If the dreams are bothering you a lot or causing you persistent distress, it's worth talking to someone about it, but in most cases it's just your mind doing its nightly cleanup work.
What usually happens is your brain uses that unknown face as a kind of "mask" to represent something it's trying to process - it could be a message your unconscious wants you to receive, or just a worry pattern that keeps repeating. If the dream has the same emotion every time (fear, sadness, confusion), that's what matters, because that feeling is what your mind actually needs you to pay attention to, not who the person is.
I had a period where this gray-bearded guy kept showing up in my dreams like three times a week, and after a while I realized it was exactly when I was stressed about something at work that I didn't know how to solve. Once I faced that problem head-on, the guy disappeared. Most likely your brain is using that face as a visual icon for something that's worrying you or that you need to process, not that the person is real or that they're sending you some hidden message.
I don't think the meaning is as straightforward as it seems, because the temptation is to look for some deep reason behind something that's often just your brain recycling visual patterns while you sleep. What most people don't mention is the risk of falling into the meaning fallacy: once you decide that dream *must* represent something important, your mind starts confirming that belief every time you have it, reinforcing the illusion that there's a hidden message when it's probably just common neurological noise.
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