Many people think that dreams are meaningful in some way. This dates back to the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung back in the late 19th century. The truth is, they knew almost nothing about the brain back then, and were pretty much guessing, based on limited information.
Modern neuroscience finds that dreams are similar to “drifting waking thought.” That is, what you dream at night is no more meaningful than your thoughts when you let them drift during the day (i.e., “daydreaming”). Dreams are not purposeful, but only happen because our brains never stop. The brain monitors the body’s energy needs 24/7; even while we sleep. Prominent dream researcher G. William Domhoff refers to dreaming as “imagination run wild.”
The point of all this is that your dreams might give you an idea of what you have been thinking — and more importantly worrying — about during your waking hours. Dreams tend to be personal. We don’t typically dream about politics or religion or economics. Across cultures, most dreams are dramatized enactments of significant personal concerns about the past, present and future. “The frequency of a given topic reflects the intensity of that concern in the dreamer’s life,” per Domhoff.
One neuroscientist likes to quip that “dreams are the brain’s way of taking out the garbage!”