No small number of my dreams are mirrors to reality, only distorted reflections of them, and they play out as any other lived experience only heightened and estranged. The first and most telling part is, is that I am almost always myself, in the sense that even when it makes no sense to simply be a sabertooth cat in the situation, I am. The dream constructs, the nameless others that appear in the dream, are either aware of this variety on a subconscious level and become increasingly alarmed by what they know to be strange but cannot see in their own midst - I assume they see a human being in an illusion of sorts - or they, if they are simulacrums of actual persons I know, at ease with my presence despite the obvious strangeness.
So life goes on with this in mind, either being a "regular", lived day of events in this sense, a modified sequence of past events that have been retold, or a scenario that plays out in extreme. Often many of these are what people would call nightmares, they tend to be frightening on the surface - often violent and conflict oriented - and are the sort of things that come from reality past but used to fuel worse and more exotic situations. Without going into detail, it is often that these are situations of "Fight, flight, or freeze." nature and battles for survival, which relies heavily on my embracing my animal talents and qualities to survive.
Others, however, are more mythical. Battles with the embodiments of evil or illness, "demons" one could say but far more abstract and sans any sense of explicit evil. Some are quasi-astral conflicts almost but all of them are symbolic rather than the more overt ones.