My dreams are fairly strange, much of the time.
One time I was with Bruce Springsteen, and we were going to Tijuana. The road there was a dirt road along a fence line, and Tom Petty came zooming up. He was a little remote control race car with a bobble-head Tom Petty head on it. He played a few bars from Free Falling. We asked him which way or something and he pointed toward a burned out building. He said he didn't want to go and zoomed away. So Bruce and I climbed down and down and down through the building, to get to Tijuana. I can't remember if we got there or not.
Another time I was in what I call The City. In this case there was the City of Death on one side, and the City of Life on the other. There is no bridge between them, and a river divides them. I wanted to cross, and the river looked very shallow, so I started to wade across. But the farther out I went, the deeper the water got, until I thought I would be washed away, so I turned back. As I went back to shore, the river got shallower and the waters all receded. I looked down at the bottom, and what looked like stones were all little objects, and it dawned on me that those were all the things people had tried to take across with them. But ultimately, one could not take anything across.
Another time I was on the other side. They showed me all around, including the place where you leave. It was the this big thing that looked like a weird Eastern European monument, and it just pointed upward. It was centered in what otherwise looked like an airport. So when you left, you just went out there someplace.
I dreamt I was in a medieval war, a mask which told me secrets (they were weird, too), and once that I was stuck in a machine that turned turned people into galaxies. It told me that basically it was there to erase my old soul and send me back to the cosmos, where I belonged. I was a kid when I had the dream, tho, and it freaked me out because I didn't want to get sucked out into the cosmos.
I had one where I was in The City, living in an abandoned office building which had been taken over by miscreants and weirdos. My kind of people. The lobby had been converted into a 24 hour bar and the offices were flophouse dormitory rooms. However, we had developed a way to get down to the bottom floor without taking so many stairs. One just leaned backward out the window and fell out. In order to avoid injury, you just really relaxed a lot and you were fine. The best part was when I demonstrated that instead of having to take the stairs back up, I could fly back up. Oh, the jealousy.
I wish I was making this up, but I'm not. That's what happens when I close my eyes at night. Actually, being asleep is way more fun than being awake for me. If I could just move into my dream world, I would.
The first and last of these dreams don't appear to give much insight into your psyche. They seem to be simple "mash up" type of dreams. Images of travelling along roads, remotely controlled cars, music, buildings, flying, all jumbled up into the psychedelic mess of the dreams that we are all so familiar with. You have dreams like this pretty much every night but forget all about them because you don't wake up at the right time.
The other dreams are more interesting.
This is the point when you would tell me about your second dream ("Another time I was in what I call The City.") and I would ask "How did you feel?"
You would then tell me the emotional context. "I felt scared", or "I felt lost", or "I felt strangely calm" or ...
I would then take that reply as my signpost and reflect the emotion back to you. "Did you feel lost because you didn't know where you were, or because you didn't know where you were going. You didn't know what was on the other side?" (for example).
Without that context, as with some of the other dreams, all I can do is look at the words that you use and take (hopefully) good guesses.
With your second dream, I think the progression goes something like this.
However you imagine The City, at the time of this dream it is very nebulous as a concept. You don't actually know what it looks like on the other side. (detail which is added in later dreams?). In your dream, you want to cross the river, but because you can't imagine exactly what it looks like, you can't cross.* There is no imagined geography to walk into so your mind finds a way out. In this case, you just turn around and walk back to the part of The City that you
have created in your mind.
As for the stones turning into possessions? Well, it does seem to be a rather literal interpretation of the phrase "You can't take it with you when you go". Does that phrase have a great meaning to you? Does it sum up how you feel after buying stuff, then looking at all of the stuff you have and feeling that non of it gives your life any meaning? (Note: this is just a different way of asking "How did you feel").
Alternatively, it could just be one of those transitions that happen in dreams. You look at the rocks and your mind wants a bit more meaning so suddenly, they're "things". The fact that they are things that could not be taken across by anyone does seem significant.
I won't go into any detail about the other dreams (look at how much I have written about just one of them!). Looking at the dreams as a whole, I get a sense of disquiet about your existence. "What's it all about", "why are we here", possibly that feeling of "Cosmic loneliness".And yes, once again I am asking "How did you feel". All very human and normal by the way. I don't have any objective evidence for this, but from the conversations I have had, a reasonable percentage of people have these kinds of feelings at some point. For some of us, it never really goes away.
Feel free to tell me that I am writing b@~~£&!t. Without being there, this is a one sided, imagined conversation, which may be very very wrong.
* Not being able to dream things you have not seen or experienced is an old observation. The Marquis d'Hervey tried to jump of a tall building in one of his lucid dreams. Everything was fine until he got to the point of impact when "within a minute, he was back on the ground, unscathed". Having never experienced falling and hitting the ground in such a way, it was impossible for him to dream of the moment of impact. He just fell, then was suddenly on the ground, but no impact.