I feel when you dream of yourself being the strong person you want to be means that you must be developing stronger. I have a lot of repeater dreams and throughout the years they slightly change as I grow mentally. Like right now I'm feeling confident with my image and so my dreams lately are showing me that too!

Also, instead of finding online what certain symbolic things mean you should look to yourself and ask what it means to you. Like I have a big fear or spiders so if they were in my dream it would mean something very very upsetting to me but to one of my old friends she saw spiders as an animal of creativity. But, the online dream interpretation guides are still interesting, fun, and helpful at times too.