"I don't think dreams can be that easily explained away"

I'll agree with you on that one. During my studies in psychology, I came to learn that there are just way too many interpretations of dreams, and a lot of them just seem to be guesswork. I mean, Freudian psychologists have drastically different interpretations of dreams than Jungian psychologists despite the fact that both groups come from the pyshoanalytical school of thought in psychology. Heck, I even had an assignment once where the class was given a "dream" to analyze, and the professor even said just to write what we felt it meant rather than applying any sort of theory or school of thought to it. Bottom line; anyone can interpret any dream in just about any way they want to. That's why I feel that dream analysis is totally useless. Mind you, I'm not in the clinical area of pyschology though.

"I didn't dream for the longest time after I moved to Ohio"

Not to quibble, but as long as you're getting REM sleep, you're dreaming. After all, dreaming is a psychological/physiological need. You probably just didn't remember your dreams for that period of time. Personally, I've only remembered a handful of my dreams from the past ten years (oddly, usually when I'm in a lighter state of sleep).