Here is my theory on dream interpretation. I wrote a little about it at the last place, so please forgive the repetition, but this is as good a place as any to lay it out fully. It is based on a dream I had maybe twenty years ago.
In that dream I was stung on my foot by a bee. I awoke to lingering pain and, upon investigating, found a small, sharp piece of plastic from the tag of a pair of jeans I had, unknowingly, tracked in my bed which my foot had encountered during the night. So the dream blended reality (the pain) with a source which, clearly, sprang from the imagination.
I think when we remember dreams we are struck by those details that differ from reality, that suggest a different world, but those are no more meaningful than my bee. That is not to suggest they are without meaning; I was terrified by bees as a child (not any more, really) and associating that fear with a sudden sharp pain is not mysterious. You get a glimpse of your mind's inner architecture by reflecting on the imagery from which it draws, those fears that are close at hand or remembered from childhood. They are the personal symbols you associate with the underlying stimulus.
If there is any connection between dreams and reality, though, it is that stimulus. Just like my sharp plastic, the stimulus is present and immediate, though frequently unacknowledged, at least consciously. But, whereas my stinger was discoverable upon waking, things like fears and feelings are a little more squishy.
We frequently experience nightmarish scenarios that have very little to do with placid, waking reality. But consider those occasions when you lie awake at night pondering some problem, and how much worse it seems than in the light of day. I've read that this is because, at night, your body burns off stress hormones generated during the day that are seldom required in modern life for their original fight-or-flight purpose, and anxiety peaks. In mental terms, the stresses that produced them are rarely acknowledged fully; in mechanical terms, they are simply not used up. Couple that with the heat and turbulence of digestion and I think you have the most common stimulus.
So to find the meaning of a dream, you strip it of all superfluous imagery and ask how it made you feel. This is an uncomfortable question, at least for most men who do not admit to feeling anything, but I am surprised by how often I can, if I am honest with myself, associate the general feeling of a dream with something that happened in the past week, if not more immediately: an instance of repressed anger, annoyance, fear, etc., or even joy denied exuberance, that clearly spawned the dream, and which my imagination has embroidered using my personal symbols much as it produced that damn bee.