Dreams are Life Experiences
Imagine that a drug had been created that can erase specific memories. Memories of childhood abuse may thereby be effectively erased.
I think everyone has the intuition that this would fix little. Survivors of childhood abuse would continue having difficulty establishing trust and forming intimate relationships. They just wouldn’t know why.
Dreams operate in the same way. Events take place that you think are real while you are experiencing them. You fear. You have glee. You react. You are changed by the experience. You might well dream again of the same theme. Months later, you become aware of habits and prejudices have formed. The difference that you have forgotten or discounted your dreams, so you come up with more plausible explanations.
Dreams are life experiences. They are to be approached with the same seriousness as waking life experiences. Maybe more, because your dream environment is much more reactive to your predilections than waking life. Virtuous circles are possible: you dream of something good, get groovy with it, and the next dream is better. The limit is how good it can be before you reject it as unrealistic. If you come to realise that realism is not the point, you are propelled into a heavenly dreamscape.
A Magical Circus Tent
Vicious circles are also possible: You suspect that you are being tricked. You suspect there are hidden dangers and threats. In subsequent dreams, the threats and dangers are manifest. Then you must deal with them. Whether you are successful or not is not as important as your attraction to the situations in the first place. You are choosing between a heaven and a hell; in this case, you’ve chosen a hell. There is no way to win at hell. All one may do is practice it. Ultimately, you get comfortable with what you are good at, and you get good at what you practice. This has an effect on your waking life.
Imagine a magical circus tent which has magical stalls at which every vice and every virtue is catered to. This is the dreaming world in its most neutral form; in principle, everything is possible. But in practice, one tends to develop particular and limited haunts. This is not how to exit the tent. One must work out a trajectory, by trial and error, that leads to the outside. This implies that your personal dreaming world is not to be sampled randomly, nor by haunts, but by deliberation and application.
This is why dreams are to be taken seriously as life experiences.
What you can do
Start by keeping a dream diary. This gives the dreams substance. It makes it easier to remember them thereafter. You’ll be surprised at how much you have forgotten a year later.
Look at your dreams and identify patterns that also occur in waking life. Develop mental habits in waking life to obviate those patterns. When your dreams become bright, and perhaps before then, some dream characters shall give you advice. Take it.