IbisNibs, & Iris-thanks for responding! I asked bc I believe my dreams are like a movie projected from my mind but some outside entity or entities will sometimes take over directorship of the dream, re-cast actors, change the plot, even use characters & places culled from my own mental "files", etc.
Especially during my intensive lucid dreaming period some years ago, I would sometimes flip back and forth between being the actor-on-stage-in-the-dream-story and the director-watching-and-managing-the-dream. The director mode was usually triggered by something that didn't seem right about the dream setting, characters or plot. In director mode I've even frozen the action (so to speak) and examined / edited the characters before returning to actor mode and letting the action continue, at which point I shift back into first-person actor mode.
Mainly bc people like close family members or longtime friends sometimes appeared in my dreams acting totally "out of character". Made me start to wonder what's up with that.
This is one of the sorts of things that might throw me into director mode and motivate me to make adjustments (or simply bail out of the dream entirely).
It can work both ways - i.e., you can either 'see' a known figure who isn't acting like the real world version or you can encounter a dream figure who seems to obviously be a known / real figure in disguise.
If there's a single overarching motif or strategy the human mind employs it's metaphor - i.e., taking X to be a stand-in representation of Y. This is the fundamental basis for a sort of free association capability that allows for invention of dream objects and characters re-designated or assembled from the entire identity or aspects of 'real world' entities.
Some such metaphorical transpositions are 'total' in the sense the whole object or person in the dream stands in for a whole object or person in 'real life.' This is similar to theatrical casting in the sense person X is acting out the role of person Y. Other such transpositions involve 'partial' correlations in the sense that (e.g.) a dream object or person may be a composite of features or actions drawn from multiple 'real world' analogues.
A few weeks ago I had an intense dream in which my father appeared in the guise of a younger slimmer man than I'd ever known my father to be. He was definitely 'Dad' to me, but the role was being played by a probably 'synthetic' actor who didn't resemble my historical father at all.
I've never had any precognitive dreams; in fact i've dreamed of foreign words or names of places that turned out to be utterly NOT real- just nonsensical...at least on this wordly plane.
This has happened to me, too. I reported one such incident in this 2013 thread:
Lexicon From Dreams
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/lexicon-from-dreams.51601/#post-1296187
If you found that the mystery word had some significance or triggered some reaction in you (as happened to me in the dream incident reported in the Lexicon thread) I suspect it's yet another example of the mind operating metaphorically. There's a thing or action or feeling to which you need to refer, but an artificial label is tagged onto it within the dream.