I, too, am figuring things out at the moment and it's funny because I just finished a dream study class and I'm not sure if it helped more than it brought up much more confusion. To give some background, the course was setup in the way that we started learning about how people, in the earliest of times, thought about dreams. Most in the very beginning accepted dreams as if there was no question of if they were real or not. For example, if you dreamt or had a vision of God, God spoke to you, there was no question.
Next we learned about how different cultures hold dreams. If I recall correctly, dreams in Chinese and Native American cultures are taken very seriously and are discussed regularly in a household. The majority of the cultures we learned about shared an idea that a person's dreamlife was connected to their waking life. A perfect example would be the yin yang symbol. The black and the white sides are slowly turning into each other.
After that we started looking at later Christianity, The Enlightenment thinkers, the Romantics, and finally four well known psychologists; Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Ménard Boss.
Basically for those topics we looked at different people's ideas about dreams, from each topic.
I'll jump straight to the Psychologists and explain the best way I can about how each
Felt in regards to dream interpretation.
As you may know, Freud is the father of modern psychology and Jung and Adler were both working with Freud.
Freud felt that there was a pattern within all dreams and no matter what the dream was, from any person, it would fit into a certain pattern and that a person would need a trained doctor, such as himself, to interpret dreams. Jung had a very strong dream that caused him to believe that all people, in all times of history were all connected through what he called the Collective Unconscious. When he told Freud about his dream and his interpretation of his own dream, Freud, in a way, told him that he was wrong and proceeded to interpret Jung's dream for himself. Jung was furious and the two went their separate ways. Jung believe that the individual needed to figure the dream out for themselves after looking at every possible meaning of each thing in a dream. As for Adler, he disagreed with both Freud and Jung. I didn't quite grasp every detail of what Adler felt but I know that he felt that dreams were continuations of a person's waking life. It would include social interactions and even things that you did in the previous day. He felt that if you had little dreams that you had few issues in your waking life and the more dreams you had, the more problems you were facing in your waking life. He developed the idea of the inferiority complex and thought that dreams balanced your waking life out. I get confused with that bit of information, I cannot remember if it was Adler or if it was Jung that thought that...it could be both but I don't want to give false information.
As for Boss, he believed that a person should not look to find any deeper meaning to a dream than the dream itself presents. Instead of trying to say that a horse, in a dream, represents ease and comfort, Boss would say that a horse in a dream is a horse in a dream but you could say that the horse could be looked at for what a person uses it for, like riding or a friend. He believed that the more you tried to look at a dream in a bunch of different ways, the more you moved away from it's actual meaning. Why can't a dream about you riding your horse simply mean that you enjoy riding and spending time with your horse?

I believe that I got of subject but I thought maybe it would be interesting to hear about, if only I made any sense.
There was a dream by Chuang Tzu(I believe the name is right) in which he dreamt that he was a butterfly and upon waking, he could not determine whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or if he was dreaming as a butterfly, at that moment, that he was a man. That seems like what you were getting at a bit. I believe Voltaire was the one that I learned about who made a similar point. You may be interested in him. I will double check on if it was Voltaire or someone else.

I really hope that I didn't confuse anyone ;/