Where I live it’s widespread to believe that dreams can be interpreted and deal with emotional matters. I tend to think it’s more of a sort of processing of the days impressions. But I don’t really know.
So what is the straight dope?
There isn’t any Straight Dope yet. It is still one of the vast number of mysteries surrounding the brain. Most scientific though leans away from Freudian type notions. The leading theories at this point believe dreams are used for some sort of information processing. Information is sorted, organized, stored, discarded, and matched into patterns. However, no one is really sure at all at this point.