Love your detailed description, it reads like a thriller.
I don't know, I have this feeling that any and everything in a dream always spawns from me, and my level of awareness will decide whether I get to play it cool (lucid) or whether to get caught up in the dream, being afraid of things that ultimately can't hurt me and never have.
In that way it's like a trip - facing fears consciously seems way more satisfying to me in the long run than battling the ghosts on a bad trip out of falling for the illusion I conjured up for myself.

But ye, I have no idea either about the whole thing. The experience just carried over into the waking state to such a physical degree, the view of "that's all pure imagination" started to lose a lot of weight and it never quite recovered for me since then.
But then, other factors also helped me look for new paradigms other than the one I had learned about in earlier years of my life - it all seemed suddenly insufficient in light of the experience.

Thinking about it I am kinda glad we have no idea what dreams are. ahahaha.