Our dreams use our own images and memories so, yes, I too have found it hard to get disentangled from them, especially if I'm in similar environs or not "doing" very much in my waking life that might help me re-orient myself by competing for head time.

Another problem I've had is later in the day/week having an image from my dream happen in real life; I walked past an area where, in my dreams there were snakes and, when I walked past it days later, I was afraid there were snakes. It's a little like having the dream "again" but in real, waking time, but I just had to work a bit to disentangle myself from the image, realize that the likelihood of snakes actually being in that piece of ground were small and that "snake" was probably representative of something else in my dream image and should not be literally translated. In my dream I had "needed" snake for something and my current, big City surrounding history came up with that location as "most likely" to work okay for me in the dream.

But I don't feel the dream "foretold" my walking past that location and/or the link still existing between my life and the dream a couple days later. The "idea" of what could happen tomorrow (run into my friend Susie) is not "new" to me and I believe that my running into Susie may be a "fun" coincidence or synchronicity but not foretold by the dream. I have known/seen/run into Susie before and the dream used that to have me run into her in the dream. The literal future is not that connected to the imagined, past dream. The opposite seems more true to me; running into Susie now has meaning because I ran into her in the dream in the past; not the past dream determining that I would run into her now, in its/my future. We have multiple synchronicities that happen daily, like we have multiple dreams at night and daydreams during the day; all of them are psychological unconscious/subconscious "information" for us to help us live our lives/"survive".