Do you think dreams get more intense, complex and meaningful when you have more knowledge of the world?
Or lets say you were raised in the mountains, without books and away from society. You meditate all day to heighten spiritual awareness.
What kind of dreams would a Tibetan monk have in relation to a scholar? It would seem to me the more you withdraw from society the more meaningful your dreams would become.
We have a finite amount of knowledge(concepts) in our head. The imagination goes to work at night, while asleep, and fuses different concepts together to form new concepts.
A Tibetan monk, I would imagine, would be limited in his dreams by how much knowledge he has about the world, and how powerful his imagination is in fusing/diffusing different concepts together.
Withdrawing from society could strengthen ones imagination, as more time would be spent using it, but there would be a decrease in data for the imagination to process.
The images of your dreams are usually your “daily residue.” That means the stuff that was in your subconscious from that day. The people in your dreams are only symbols of you or parts of you. Your dreams are never about anyone else but you.
If you wake up with a racing heart it is because the dream was about something important, but not something frightening. When you keep having the same dream or same theme that is because you are not getting the message of the dream.
But the symbols in your dreams are just symbols that your mind gets from your daily life. Of course plenty of people may have a dream with a lion in it not because they have seen a lion, but a lion is a symbol for something, like courage. So the symbols are sometimes so abstract they have no barring on your life at all.