This is sort of a cross post (not sure if this is allowed). I posted it here as well.
www(dot)dreamviews(dot)com/f45/where-does-dream-imagery-come-i-had-experience-relating-122203/

I don't want a complete copy and paste, so I'll just copy the crux of my argument:
What appeared to me was happening as that as I entered a dream, everything in my short term memory and the sum of all my thoughts would start to "collide".

The only dream I still recall was that I ended up in an office, which was a half assed recreation from a tv show I watched earlier that day. My boss was slamming a sledge hammer into the floor, doing some sort of construction. Being in a self reflective state though, I could see that this was not some profound meaningful statement... but I was remember some construction work on nearby road, and was partially thinking about emails my boss had sent me while I was out sick.

In other words, I had all these thoughts and memories floating around, and in my dream they were all intersecting in a freestyle type mashup. This happened to me several times, and by the end of my illness I was really able to see my thoughts go from a focused stream to a slowly deconstructing tangled web that would directly relate into my dream world's contents...
Prior to this, I always thought that dreams made sense in some context. I had thought that maybe your subconscious was doing something cool and complex. Instead, my experience led me to believe it was more or less random due to a lack of conscious focus and control.

Later on, I experienced more evidence of this, as I started to tell my wife about my dreams... and she started noticing many of the objects were probably due to other random objects/events I encountered. The subconscious did come in to play, as a lot of my dream experiences weren't from things I directly noticed. Some of it were things I indirectly noticed, and did not immediately realize. For instance, one person in my dream was actually someone I had as a cashier at Target (they had a weird hair style), and I had really had to think back to recall them. My wife, who had a different perspective, was able to recognize this right away.

I'm curious to hear other peoples thoughts on this..