Fascinating example and question. I'll try to answer on a personal rather than an abstract level. For me dreams often produce very precise emotions which are then the key to understanding a certain situation. For instance, maybe I'm vaguely upset with a certain person or situation in life, but haven't really dealt with it or don't know what to do. A dream may come in which a fairly obscure scene is recreated (a moment from childhood where a favorite toy was broken), which brings back a very strong, very particular feeling: for me then, waking up in the rush of that feeling allows me to put my finger on something I'd been sensing about the relation to this person which I had nonetheless not been able to really bring into awareness or articulate.

In intellectual life one can say "situation X is like situation Y," but recollections of past emotions are not intellectual; you need to enter into them again for the analogy to stick. Even if one were to make the connection to that past situation in waking life, the re-immersion isn't something one can really casually do walking home after work; in this sense, for me, the intense environment of a dream is useful.

You Wells know thyself, Margaret. So you mean to say that one could see the dream as a key to a locked door. A solution to a problem, when one knows how to use the key and interpret well the signs back to the real world.

A great example of finding a solution through a brilliant interpretation is in Genesis 41, Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream:

“From the Nile were coming up seven cows, of handsome appearance and robust flesh, and they pastured in the marshland. And behold, seven other cows were coming up after them from the Nile, of ugly appearance and lean of flesh, and they stood beside the cows which were on the Nile bank. And the cows of ugly appearance and lean of flesh devoured the seven cows that were of handsome appearance and healthy.”

The Egyptian interpreters could not give Pharaoh a satisfactory explanation since the dream’s last part seemed illogical- the thin and weak cows eating the fat and healthy cows. It is usually the opposite, the strong eats the weak. Joseph’s interprets the dream as seven plentiful years followed by seven years of famine. Unlike the Egyptian’s, he believes that the dream is a sign and holds in it the solution to the problem. He sees and understands how it would be possible to overcome famine, through using part of the good cows to help the thin cows survive.

This dream is also a metaphor to the power of dream, how anticipation can overcome adversity, and how the weak overcomes the strong. How following, listening, to our dreams can lift us from poverty.