These are images and words in the night. "In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men, while slumbering on their beds, when he opens the ears of men, and seals their instruction" (Job 33:15-16 NKJV). Until you get to the place where you have extracted certain behaviors from your system, one needs God to have something to put in your face. Many times, God has to go outside of our spiritual capacity and connect us to something psychologically or scare us with some kind of threat in order to keep us until we can walk as he wants us to walk. He uses consequences and deterrents that catch us quickly. They catch you on the way so you don't get too deep into something that is going to take half of your mind to get out of it. "You don't want to go to the edge of your mind to change your mind in order to do a different behavior" (Noel Jones). Within the context of this reference, those catalysts, consequences, and deterrents are your dreams.