Dreams are meaningless, They occur as part of the waking up process and may be considered akin to the flushing of the toilet after evacuating the cognitive waste resultant from a restorative sleep. Don't forget to wipe off after awakening.

Dreams are a place where the mind blends thoughts and events over a period of time, into a story, and mixes with a bit of nonsense to fill in the holes. That's how I see it. When I do dream I tend to have very vivid ones. One dream involved me and my family staying in a tent, and our cats living in a small glass house. Earlier in the waking day, I joked about getting a tent for the cats to stay in. Our little travel trailer was a tad cramped. In yet another dream I was walking through a field of frozen wheat. Just to wake up in winter with my lower legs uncovered. Most of my dreams are in color, except one I can remember where I was a detective in an old noire office. I was grabbed from behind and put to sleep with a mysterious blue liquid. Of course, I woke up afterward remembering how the previous day I had removed blue ink off my hands with rubbing alcohol. I no longer see dreams as having meaning. Even so, I still enjoy the occasional zombie fight or flying dreams (The Greatest American Hero TV show screwed those up for a while)...

When we sleep, the by product chemicals of being awake are cleaned from our brain. As these chemicals are cleaned, some trigger the nerves in our visual cortex. This triggering causes dreams. It means nothing.

I don't know but I recently noticed there is never a cell phone present in my dreams. Nobody I have asked can remember having one in theirs either.

It does have merit. To remember your dreams you have to ask yourself "what did I dream" within the first 15 minutes of waking. If you do not do this you will not remember. Dreams are normally anxiety and a mixture of unfinished business. A distorted view of what is on your mind. You may have thoughts of freedom, fear, etc. mixed into them in some way. I monitor my dreams and they almost always fit in with my daily life and how it is going, OR my daily life and how I would like it to be. You can learn from dreams but you must remember they are fantasy. Why are you dreaming? It's because your mind is partially awake. Early man could not separate the dream state from the waking state and stories of gods were invented. In the bible Paul had many "visions" but he could not tell "whether he was in or out of the body." You can thank Paul for "soul belief" being a big part of Christianity.

I have a couple of thoughts one of my own and one from somewhere else that offers some merit.
Mine: The brain, much like a computer needs to defrag....so as bits and pieces of info are getting arranged, sorted and harmonized our brain weaves little stories out of those bits and pieces as they are flying by.
Richard Carrier in Sense and Goodness without God, thinks of the brain as the ultimate Virtual Reality Device that can run all kinds of simulations without having to expend the energy or risk doing so in real life which better prepares us when faced with something similar.

Dreams are often interpreted as:

• wish fulfillment
• the mind integrating what happened during that day into your memories
• the mind working out solutions to the days problems or preparing for the next day
• and so on

A useful question to ask is, what would have happened next in the dream if you hadn't woken up?

Oh, man--last dream I can remember ended with me and Bradley Cooper and another girl and I'mma just stop right now...

Sorry, no, not statistically supported.

Some people analyze things to death trying to ascertain some meaning to it. My attitude is, it is what is is.

I don't know. When I wake up after a dream there is just wonder and some confusion. The dreams don't seem to have anything to do with reality for me.

Sex & breakfast?

I am pretty skeptical about assigning meaning to dreams. While you're asleep, mostly in REM sleep, the brain is very active, and we don't fully know what it's doing. Dreaming could simply be a way for our psyche to interpret the firing neurons without any sensory input. It's easy for me to believe that our brain fills in that neural activity with random visuals and narratives. Any meaning derived from them might just be a case of "seeing what you want to see".