Disappointment in Dreamland

I was having this dream the other night in which I was with a woman - not one I recognised as being anyone I knew, or even had seen on TV or a film, (indeed, as befits someone of my advancing years she too seemed more mature than the fantasy women of my youth).  Anyway, there came a point in the dream at which she asked me if I wanted to make love to her - my dream self responded that, frankly, I just didn't have the energy for that sort of thing these days.  Jesus, I thought upon wakening, is nothing sacred?  I mean, dreams are meant to be an escape from real life, but mine now seem to have started mirroring my waking life to an uncomfortable degree.  What's happened to the usual parade of car chases, mad giallo-type intrigues, police procedurals and killer bears that fill my dreams?  OK, they also rub shoulders with more mundane stuff involving walking through strange, yet oddly familiar, streets, conversations with strange, yet familiar, people and the like, but even these are clearly fantastical and several steps away from reality.  Perhaps it is all down to the fact that, with my new exercise regime, I'm sleeping better these days and not waking up in the middle of dreams, so that I don't remember so many of them.  

Of course, we always return to the question of whether any of these dreams actually mean anything.  Increasingly, I doubt that they do have any significance.  They merely represent the sub conscious idling while the conscious mind is off-line.  At best, they are a form of entertainment assembled by the sleeping mind from memories - not just of real events, but also things we've seen on TV, or read about in books, or even looked at on the internet - designed to keep the waking part of the mind occupied during its down-time.  As I've noted before, my dreams, (possibly fueled by some of the medication I take these days), are indeed hugely entertaining - all technicolor and widescreen.  Yet no matter how vivid, how realistic or how detailed they are, there is always something about them that marks them out to me, even as I experience them, as being dreams.  It's got to the stage that my dream self is aware of the 'rules' that govern them and is able to use them to manipulate in-dream events.  Which is another reason why that recent dream was so disconcerting - my dream self totally failed to grasp the mettle and take full advantage of the situation...