More often than not, dreams are just dreams. Your brain has signals going through it all the time. When you are awake, the outside world helps you make sense of those signals- they become sights and sounds and stimulations that use the other senses. When you are asleep, you don’t have that stimulation- you don’t see anything, you block sounds out- so you don’t perceive hearing as much (that’s why fire alarms are really loud), you aren’t moving, so there isn’t much to feel, you aren’t eating or doing anything that would make you taste or smell different things- so your brain turns to your memories to deal with the random signals- that is how dreams occur.
Most of the time, your experiences in your sleep are one of two things: dreams, and physical stimuli from the world that are strong enough to affect you while you’re asleep (a fire alarm, someone pinching your nose if you’re snoring too loud, falling out of bed, etc.).
Sometimes, people have spritual encounters in their sleep- these aren’t the same thing as dreams, but it could be easy to confuse the two, because these spiritual encounters are far less common. If God is telling you something, He’ll make sure you understand it.
