Dreams, hypnosis and other psychology pitfalls

Last night I was having a dream. I woke up with the feeling that my subconscious was trying to tell me something. It can't have been too important, because I lost it within seconds. It was combining elements of the book I've been reading with what goes on in my daily life.
Dreams are pretty important. Sometimes they are an expression of something that got past us in the day. Psychologists say that they are "an expression of the human subconscious acting out what we are afraid of in the waking state." In my experience, a dream is usually just a jumble of what went on when I was awake, turned into a story for the entertainment of my sleeping brain.
Which just goes to show you that I need to get out more.
Sometimes I use a technique known as directed dreaming. In this method, once you realize you are dreaming, you decide which way you want the dream to go. I discovered it as a way to get over nightmares as a child. If you are falling off of a building and realize it's a dream, you simply imagine flying.
The problem with this is that dreams are strongly connected to memory. By trying to alter the dream, you might inadvertently call up random memories, thus changing the dream again. Not enough is known about the human mind to understand the consequences of messing around in there. There is the distinct possibility of screwing up your short term memory.
That brings me to hypnosis and "repressed memories". You read about police arresting someone based on the memories of a "victim" brought up through hypnosis. The problem with hypnosis is that it is too easy to suggest a memory. It is a state of relaxation that leaves a person susceptible to imagining things as being real. A person in this state can take a suggestion, however faint, and believe it is memory.
Hypnosis is dangerous if played with by the inexperienced. My psychology professor said that he once made an awful mistake that traumatized a young woman for months. He had given her the suggestion that she would not be able to see a person at a party until he lit up a cigarette. When he did, the person just materialized out of nowhere. The woman fainted. If you are going to work with the human mind, you have to think it through and be responsible.
For all of the exploration we've done, there is so much we do not yet know about ourselves.