Responding to: You know how when you cut off the head of a chicken the body runs around for a while or flops all over the place? The reasoning is that by detaching the brain, all those reflexes, muscles, and responses are now uncontrolled and they can suddenly run loose. I think dreams are like that….when you conscious mind goes to sleep there's nothing to regulate the rest of your brain and you wind up with dreams about whatever you’ve been processing lately. But, I also think that dreams are also the result of numerous minute observations and inputs we receive but unconsciously ignore during the day. That's where that ‘sixth sense’ comes from… that feeling that something is awry. You unconsciously notice little details about things and your brain puts them together without you even being aware of it. Some of that goes into your dreams.
Anyway, I’m open-minded enough to think that perhaps my brain picked up some details about the world around me and thinks they might point to something like that. So…make sure everything is in place, just in case.
My comment: You are pretty correct. Dreams are greatly composed of loose ends from the day. Our attention is drawn towards many things during the daytime, and, because of time demands, discomfort, stress, logical association, or other directions of our attention, these leads are never really resolved. This is by the work, generally speaking, of the 'sub/unconscious / suppressing (or regulating) the id'.
In order for our bodies and minds to regenerate/grow at night, these lost avenues are again explored. It is not entirely a random thing - it has purpose. This is why so many discoveries, inventions, songs, etc., come in dreams, after the conscious person had been stumbling around trying to figure things out more analytically. During dreams, the mind reaches back towards a more holographic processing of input, which can lead to nonsense or to great flashes of insight. And this is also why a more complete psychic sense or meaning can emerge, or be resolved, from dreams. The finer, 'quantum' leads tend to have a better chance of forming some kind of image in dreams.
Likewise, this is how seemingly random 'suspicions' or 'superstitions' can find better development and association with each other, chaotically or meaningfully. There being no real line separating the two.