Dreams are meaningful, but not in the sense that they call for waking/conscious interpretation. Once the dream has been experienced by the sleeping-state consciousness, it has served its purpose. The emotional impressions, symbolism, metaphors, exaggerated variants of actual situations, etc. have all made their necessary impressions on the subconscious mind.
As far as I can tell, at least in my experience, the purpose of dreams is mainly to cancel out certain dispositions accumulated in the mind (which you may or may not be consciously aware of) over the course of the day, and sometimes over the course of years or one’s lifetime, through exposure to the elements of the dream. If the disposition you’ve gained during the previous day/week/etc. is a change you wanted and consciously worked toward, then your dreams won’t cancel it out. Another purpose may be to properly integrate the day’s/week’s/life’s events into the psyche that weren’t fully emotionally registered at the times of their happenings.
Whatever it is that weaves your dreams, it uses whatever elements are convenient for it, and if the thing that changed your mind’s disposition most is something that happened or that you thought of the previous day/week/etc., then that will be the dream weaver’s best resource, so you’ll dream about stuff that actually happened. And of course you’ll also dream about stuff that actually happened for the purpose of integrating the day’s/week’s/etc.’s events into your psyche.
Interpreting dreams is something that can lend a little insight sometimes, or at least can be a fun thing to do, but it’s ‘extra,’ and furthermore, we’re hopelessly bad at doing that. Our analytical understanding of our dreams is minuscule compared to the complete meaning, which is actually a myriad of things… Every element of a dream simultaneously means a thousand things at once, brilliantly, and it holistically connects to every other element to mean even more myriad things.
I have actually known several people who were apparently very gifted at interpreting dreams, but even they generally offer exactly one interpretation. I can be good at it too, sometimes. The best approach for interpreting dreams seems to be to closely introspect on how the events of the dream actually make you feel.
Even though dreams are meaningful, the way in which we tend to see their contents and meaningful can be misleading. For example, if you dream about something happening in the future, that doesn’t mean it will happen in the future (though I do think dreams can sometimes be premonitive). Or if you dream something about some other person, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything about that other person (usually it’s all about you, though occasionally people have told me dreams they’ve had about me taht were spot on regarding my current inner world). Or there are a million other ways they can be misleading… Dreams can highlight or exaggerate particular themes that are only small parts of a vast, multidimensional truth. Sometimes one part of the truth can be highlighted by a dream where there are other parts of the truth that are antithetical to that part that aren’t proportionately represented in the dream, which can be misleading upon waking analysis. Also, dreams are highly symbolic and a given symbol may mean something different to one’s analytical mind than what it was meant to mean to the dreamer’s subconscious. Another way interpreting dreams can be misleading is through taking certain elements of a dream to be omens, or signs that you should make a particular decision, when they aren’t really.
There is this idea floating around that dreams are due to random neuron firings, and/or the purpose of dreaming is to transition memories into long-term storage. ‘Jack’ from Modernspring.xyz expresses the view nicely, in response to the question, “What are dreams made of?” His answer is, “Almost random fragments of your experiences as they are consolidated into long-term storage. Then you brain tries to make a story about the scattered bits. It helps you remember, but the dream may be just a side effect.”
This is a highly scientistic conception of the purpose of dreams. Seeing it as meaninglessly random neural firings is the default option for those who need a scientific answer, given that science does not really currently undersand how dreams work. As for the long-term storage, surely they’ve done some brain scans and noticed a correlation between the dreaming process and long-term storage, and that may be one function of dreaming, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only purpose or even the main purpose.
