Metaphorically, this is fairly straight forward. First, you should realize that latent memories - the kind that get set on the back burner of your mind but are not completely forgotten, are the things that build our dreamscapes. What is most important here is the transformation and adjustment with the "damage" in your eye. The eye here could (and probably does) reflect your view of the world around you. The stinging and lens is a shock of truth that has come through your psyche filters. With this understanding of something that you otherwise were either unaware of or were oblivious to, you have to adjust and change how you see things. So you take the lens out (lifting the filters that determine how you perceive and thus react to the world). Doing so causes the confusion - after all, the world is not simply how any one person sees it, and there are bigger truths out there than simply you and I. You can try to ask others for help, but everybody sees the world through their own filters. Only you can determine how your filters will affect you. In time, your filters re-grow, newly adjusted to this fresh understanding (just as the eye healed in your dream).

Often this mental transformation is worked through the subconscious, and dreams like this are your brain trying to talk through the details of the confusion and tension of the shedding of old filters and growing of new ones.