Interpreting my dream

I have had a question from the reader, and have responded as follows, which I thought might be of interest to posterity:

My theory of dreams (based on what I know of the relevant science from John Kihlstrom at Berkeley's course on Consciousness and a few other relevant inputs) is that your brain takes itself off-line from most of the motor systems, and cycles over a lot of content from memory (today and elsewhere) during REM sleep which is a very low activation and a very great rest.  Your brain is at its free associative best shortly before and after waking up (I think its Alpha wave), and so those memories that are being chewed over (which can be remembered feelings calling up appropriate scenes rather than the other way around) get assembled into a story if you retain any of them as you wake.  If there is anything to be made of dream interpretation, it comes from asking the question of what story you made of the raw ingredients - what was in the observer that got imposed on the memories.

For my dream, I think the key part of the story is that having seen a monster, I immediately assumed his 'parents' made him that way for their own purposes and that he was lonely.  And I thought that was terrible. I am hypochondriac enough to see myself in the monster, and anxious enough about parenting to wonder whether all my talk of tristrapedia's is going to turn out to be abuse. I'm also anxious about my biceps, because I haven't been exercising as much as I was.  

I don't really think there's a dangerous level of monsterism in this.  You give your children the best you've found or won for yourself, and hope they are like enough to you that it does them some good. If you can give them some guidance into your roads not taken, so much the better.