Does the nature of dreams reveal a sort of semantic nihilism about concepts? (This question is hard to sum up in a title, I elaborate below)

I find it bewildering the way in which dreams have a way of creating meaningful connections between things which in retrospect have no logical relation to each other, and what this means about the very idea of a concept in general. For example, sometimes I’ll associate a certain shape with an action that can’t be carried out physically. And I’ll interpret it as an action despite the fact that it involves no actual procedures being carried out whatsoever.

I find this fascinating because it implies that there’s some subjective feeling associated with concepts we use which has no relation at all to what the concepts actually refer to. You can literally have a dream where your mother is a word, and you’re certain it’s your mother despite it not behaving or looking anything like her. It’s completely arbitrary.

And it’s not like it can be explained away by contemporary psychology, because afaik most theories would at the very least converge on the idea that your conceptualisation of, say, people (like your mother) can be articulated in some psychologically stable and logically constraining ways. Not that this would necessarily be consciously available to the person, but at the very least there’s some assumption of determinateness there underlying your mental concepts (“my mother is NOT x”). But dreams make me doubt even this seemingly reasonable assumption. It’s like similarity or associativeness goes out the window entirely.

This introduces loads of other questions. Does logic just not apply to certain subjective experiences? Or is it that there is no principled linking mechanism between different concepts that make them feel linked? And if it’s the latter, what does that means for epistemology? It seems to conclude a sense of groundlessness about semantics which casts doubt on our ability to even trust our internal world, let alone the external world.

Sorry if this isn’t very well articulated, but I thought it was interesting and am wondering what your thoughts are on this.