Hi Occipitalred, nice to see you still visit here. It’s been a while for me.

I generally agree with what you’re saying. The idea that dreams are these cryptic puzzles to decipher is an enticing idea, but I’ve never really found any evidence of this either. Humans love to find meaning in things and if you’re looking for meaning, you’ll likely find it, but that doesn’t mean the thing itself actually has meaning, at least not a purposefully fabricated meaning conjured up by some all knowing unconscious mind, which is how some people see it. In fact, it’s more likely that dreams are worthless nonsense as you say and that’s why they are mostly erased from memory upon waking.

With that said, I do think you can glean valuable insights into how your own mind works by closely analysing the dream to see how particular schemas/ ideas connect and how you, the protagonist in these dreams, react to the situations that arise. For example, I’m quite often heroic in my dreams and quick to help someone in danger. Would I actually risk my life like this in waking life? I hope I would, but I’ve never been in a situation to know for sure. Observing how I dealt with the perilous situation however was quite encouraging and made me feel that maybe I can be heroic.

If I was a dream interpreter I may look at your dream and say something generic like, “you’re feeling anxiety in your life and you’re feeling unprepared for a task that’s troubling you”. Now, stress and anxiety certainly do effect our dreams, there’s good evidence of this and maybe it did have some influence on your mood in the dream, but it’s also likely your anxiety was caused by the confusion and panic that arose due to the situation you found yourself in.

I would instead look at it like this: the dream begins to form and the mind expects you to be in a setting. With no reference to go off it builds up a familiar or archetypal setting, in this case a school. This activates school schemas in the brain bringing up imagery of desks, teachers and homework. With your memory impaired during sleep, you feel confused and have no memory of having had homework, creating the belief, “I forgot, I haven’t done it!” This naturally leads you to feel embarrassed as you likely would in this situation. In panic you look at the book for an answer, the mind needs to guess again and the word “pentagon” arises, maybe because the dream is activating a “Math book” schema now. The word pentagon associates with the word “table” in your mind due to the similar sounding “ta” sound, and on it goes.

So as I’ve laid it out here you can see there is no meaning in it, you and your mind are simply in a feed back loop as it fills in the blanks and you react to what arises. Some may find this conclusion unsatisfying but I find it fascinating.

To answer the subject question now, I would say that becoming lucid in a dream doesn’t interrupt any important insights the brain is conjuring up for you, so I don’t think changing the plot and doing your own thing whilst lucid is a bad thing, but by becoming lucid you may actually be interfering with other important processes going on in the brain that shouldn’t be interrupted by the change in mental state as you become lucid. There is no strong evidence yet that lucid dreaming is bad for the brain but it does appear to be an unnatural mental state and there may be a very good reason for the lack of it whilst we sleep.

Anyway, that’s just my thoughts on the matter. I’d love to know what you think.