I do dream work a lot and it's really fun. Like you I used to think a lot of dreams were just BS, but after keeping a journal I'll tell you most of mine are actually like a kind of bizarre poetry. Dreams are how our brains store information, while you're asleep your brain decides what info to store and what to forget, it also saves emotional memories which are what I think the feelings evoked by the symbolism in the weird dream. So in my view interpreting dreams is like reading the unconscious. The nice thing about them is I can always tell my T all of a dream without being embarrassed because after all they are just dreams and things are merely symbolic.

I've had the parent dying dream before. Dreams are always symbolic of things and rarely literal. In my situation it was when I was facing the reality my parent was never truly there for me. Yours could be different.