I think what you can and can't do in a dream must be as individual as dream imagery - i.e., many people have broadly similar experiences, but one person's experience cannot be generalized in any prescriptive sense. Most people can't read in dreams. I can read in dreams if I try hard enough, but the words keep slipping around. Escargot and Mindalai can read with ease. The common wisdom that you cannot read in dreams is clearly untrue, but it is still true that most people cannot do so. Someday, someone may devise an experiment that can distinguish the qualities that separate dream-readers from non-dream-readers from intermediates like myself, and that may tell us something about the brain we didn't know before.
When I was young, it was common wisdom that only geniuses dreamed in color. Now everybody dreams in color and no one but me seems to have noticed the transition, though I can find you textual evidence of the assumption in published work. (Okay, it's a Trixie Belden mystery, but series fiction is a grand place to locate unexamined cultural assumptions.)
I have labyrinthine house dreams, but they are the opposite of dreadful. I always hate to wake up from them because there's still so much house to explore. Sometimes I find unused space attached to the house I'm living in, sometimes I go back to visit a place I "used to live in" at some indeterminate period, sometimes we just purchased or are considering purchasing the house and are exploring and assigning room uses, and once in awhile I'm doing a straightforward home invasion out of curiosity. I attribute the specific imagery of the house dream to life as an Air Force brat - I've done a lot of moving and I'm always viewing houses with an eye to living in them, even though I've lived in the house I intend to die in for almost 20 years now. The sense of ever-expanding space, surprises around every corner, vast potential, and freedom is indescribably glorious and expresses, in microcosm, that supremely Fortean feeling that I live in an infinite universe. House dreams therefore happen when I'm in a hopeful stage of life, so it's a relief to have one again when I've been going through a bad patch.
A friend of mine, however, has house dreams that are the exact opposite - the rooms get smaller and smaller until he finds himself trapped in a basement, unable to turn around or go forward. I'm not about to discuss other people's personal lives here, but we all have periods in which we feel our lives closing in on us and it's not exactly gossiping to say that it's during those times that he has these dreams. I suspect that Mr. Radio's labyrinth dreams, with their frustration and dread, are connected to his lifelong devotion to tracking subjects through the Fortean hall of mirrors, and reflect the periods of inevitable fed-up-ness that such a pursuit entails. And so on. In dreams as in literature, similar imagery expresses wildly divergent meanings depending on who's using them.
I don't remember ever having to turn on the lights in a house dream, but then I don't actually use them much in real life, either. I prefer natural lighting, and even at night I tend not to turn them on unless I'm going to be reading. Since I seldom pull the blinds, I'd rather feel my way through the familiar rooms than provide passerby-television. In a recent dream in which I discovered a new wing to the current house, including a basement, I did have to turn off a gas space heater on the wall of the stairs leading up to the kitchen It pissed me off, because it had evidently been burning since before we moved in, increasing our utility bill, causing a fire hazard, and unneccessarily heating the kitchen in summer without providing significant benefit in winter.
