A metaphysical teacher once gave me a rather amazing technique for learning from dreams. She said that when I first wake up from a dream and remember it well, to close my eyes and try remembering the dream from the viewpoint of one of the other characters in the dream. Remember the dream again, but from their point of view.
I tried this the very next morning and the results were truly astonishing. I had just woken up from a dream in which I was admiring a lovely view from a balcony on top of a high mountain. As I was there enjoying the scenery, several men in black clothing rode up to the base of the mountain on horseback and used ropes to pull me and the balcony down to the base of the mountain. I felt so sad, wondering why anyone would want to destroy a place so lovely with its perfect view. So I closed my eyes and imagined being one of those horsemen dressed in black. To my delight, it worked! I remembered the whole dream over again from the horseman's point of view, not as though I was making it up, but in the same way and just as clearly as I had first remembered the dream. As him, I experienced that he was finding emotional delight in seeing the balcony fall from atop the mountain.
Then I realized it was the same "delight" I had experienced myself in other dreams, such as one in which I watched a train jump its tracks while crossing a high bridge between mountains and come tumbling down to the valley below. I had enjoyed that! So evidently the man on the horse had also been me, the same "me" that enjoyed seeing the train fall. They were two different parts of the same person, both of them me. One "me" enjoying the beauty of the height, and the other "me" enjoying bringing it all down.
Not only did this teach me dreams are truly multidimensional, experienced in different ways by different parts of the dreamer, but it also taught me that one part of the dreamer can truly "upset the apple cart," as it were, spoiling the happiness felt by another part of the same dreamer. How great it would be if these "parts" could communicate, finding mutual goals where both could be happy with the shared results they create in the dream and perhaps do likewise in the physical world.
The next time I tried this technique was when I woke from a dream in which my mother had been saying things to me that didn't seem to make sense. I had listened and tried, but I just couldn't understand where she could be coming from or what the point was behind her strange statements. So I closed my eyes and re-entered the dream, remembering it from my mother's point of view. Again, the technique worked perfectly -- my mother's words immediately made perfect sense. I now grasped exactly what she'd been trying to tell me and why it mattered to her. Better yet, as my mother, I saw concepts and attitudes in her that I had not known were there, things I believe to be real about my mother that I didn't know until I experienced them from her viewpoint in the dream.