Quote:
Dreams can contain strange and altered realities. However dreams are never about the strangeness or the alteration of reality.
If people with bad intentions are chasing you in a dream, you don't start thinking about why your life changed so much that now you have people wanting to kill you. All you think about is what you need to do to prevent those people catching up with you and killing you, which might involve running, or attacking your attackers, or perhaps calling out for help.
Given that dreams are often seem very strange when we wake up and remember them, but don't "feel strange" when we are dreaming them, it is plausible to suppose that our sense of "strangeness" is actively suppressed when we are dreaming.
End quote.
This is correct. During REM dreaming the executive functions on the brain are shut off. Why is this?
We can remember some of our dreams, and in our dreams we behave. This means we get to examine our unconstrained behaviours and judge them for their suitability to the situation.
The situations our brains construct during REM dreams are formed in incredibly neurologically biased conditions. Norepinephrine levels, a stress related neurotransmitter, are 85% below base waking levels during REM dreaming (Norepinephrine levels spike after a stressful event, but it's 85% below resting levels!). And there is plenty of evidence to show, low Norepinephrine levels mean a relaxed mind.
Think of the fantasies that the brain creates during moments of fear when awake. Say you have a fear of flying, the fantasies all urge avoidance - 'the plane will crash', 'the wheels will fall off before we land', etc... That is how the brain builds fantasies when Norepinephrine levels are high. When they are low fantasies urge the opposite of avoidance - they urge action. You are being attacked -> you need to fight back. Someone is trying to steal your things -> stop them. Someone has upset you -> tell them.
So we find ourselves in situations in our dreams which demand action, and we get to see how we behave on a solely emotional level (because executive functions are off). If we are not behaving in accordance to what the action-demanding situation requires, then we have learnt something about a fear we have. Something present at an emotional level which is stopping us from taking useful action.
Correcting that is a matter of consciously breaking this pattern in your waking life. Taking action when you were previously scared to and discovering you are ok, and did not need to be scared.
From my experience working with dreams in therapy (mine and with others in theirs), good dream analysis acts as an incredibly astute method to diagnose unconscious anxieties.
I got very interested in dreams after their usefulness in my therapy, so wrote a paper on the above with 13 examples of dreams in (5 are mine if I remember correctly). The paper: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz HN discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590