A pretty strong argument I heard once was that if dreams were meaningful and insightful, then natural selection would have made us be able to remember all of them as perfectly as possible. If they’re not useful/meaningful, and are just random nonsense cooked up by a brain that’s mostly in the off-position, then there wouldn’t be any evolutionary push towards being able to remember dreams.
Reality: We mostly forget nearly all of them and to the extent we do remember, it tends to be rather fuzzy.
The safe bet is that dreams are like those images cooked up by Google’s deep learning software. Minus input, the neurons keep firing and create meaningless output based on a null signal, from random images that are stored in the neural network.
After some introspection I think it is simply a dream about a lot of recent change in my life. I’ve read dreams about the apocalypse can be about life changes and fears of uncertainty. Had a life that was on a specific course, now recently divorced, had to sell my house, lots of ongoing change and uncertainty. I think it was my subconscious telling me that ultimately even though change can invoke fear and uncertainty, in the end I will overcome and persevere, and maybe I have more confidence in myself than I think.
I think Freud was close to right, in thinking dreams are one way of the unconscious to talk to the conscious. He overstated his case badly, but, sometimes…
A good friend of mine moved away. Moved to another state, and now I only get to see him every few years.
Shortly after he left, I dreamed that he was falling off a cliff, and I was unable to reach him in time to save him.
Metaphor is obvious: loss. The dream cast my conscious feelings of loss and sorrow into a death image.
Some dreams have meanings.
Others are just kaleidoscopic images that don’t mean much at all.