before I was integrated, when ever I had something like this happen to me my treatment providers told me its normal and not part of my having dissociative problems.

in general dreams/nightmares are the brains natural way of processing everything that goes on with a human being, things like emotions, fantasy, positive and negative events..... As human beings that includes having a logical mind that can whether asleep or awake look at things from many different perspectives..

(a common example of this is think of a problem or word, now think about all the different ways of solving that problem...or defining that word. the brain will naturally start brain storming on all the many infinite possibilities. another common example everyone mental disordered or not can related to is the word game Boggle it has many dice with letters on them. you shake it up then look at the letters showing and make as many words as possible that you can think of. the list of words you can make with only a few lettered dice is infinite)

when a person dreams their dreams are made of of memories, emotions, events, everything you can possibly think of, in infinite number of combinations.

some people whether they are normal or mentally challenged or physically challenged dream in black in white , others full on color, others from one perspective and others from many different perspectives...just how the brain works in general. sometimes dreams make sense and other times they are complete fantasy and other times they can be metaphor...

what a dream means and how\why\what a person dreams only the person dreaming can say because its their dream\their nightmare.

my suggestion is contact your treatment providers, they will be able to help you to understand whats what with your dreams.

another suggestion when ever i have have a strange dream or nightmare I use my reality testing tools. if there is something that is out of reality testing then i know that its not dissociative, it could be something to do with my psychosis or meds.

example your sentence above of not knowing whether the dream\nightmare was happening many times or running concurrently would tell my treatment providers to check my meds. why because with dissociative problems reality testing remains intact, i know whats really happening during my dissociative problems but its hard to tell whats really happening when my meds are out of whack and having psychosis problems in me. and sometimes medications can cause me to have some pretty strange dreams.

my point\suggestion...maybe try some reality testing and contact treatment provider for meds assessment problems.