Originally Posted by ngdawg

Our day actually has a lot to do with our dreams, even the action movies. But I'd be willing to bet that those dreams don't follow the movies, they just borrow the actions and maybe the actors.
They can be a review of the day, broken down into weird vignettes or they can be puzzle pieces of our feelings and fears. Sometimes they're very relaxing, but sometimes, like the OP, they can be weirdly terrifying. Sometimes they help us remember something we just couldn't put our finger on in our waking hours(I like those kind!)
Dreams are used in the mental health field to get to the root of issues that can't otherwise be recognized or expressed. That can be tricky-people have thought they'd been abused based on dreams revealed to therapists and, in fact, there have been court cases where abusers were brought to trial years after the committed crime, based on the dreams of the victim, who'd forgotten the events. One was a murder case quite a while back, where the killer's daughter had long forgotten what had happened, but dreamed about it as an adult. The man had killed her friend and was convicted of murder, primarily based on the daughter's newly-discovered recollections.
I can't find the particular case online-it was during the 80's. If I do, I'll post it.