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From the psychoanalytic perspective of his book 'The Interpretation of Dreams', Sigmund Freud conceives of dreams in a starkly different light. According to Freud, the various questions you are asking cannot only not be directly answered, but also do not address what is truly at the heart of the material content of dreams. Instead, Freud claims that dreams are fundamentally based on the fulfillment of wishes, whether they be conscious or unconscious.

Granted, Freud did enough cocaine to kill a small horse (as Robin Williams puts it), however I believe he has good sense to define dreams in these terms. It is the essential split between the id and the superego that results in the suppression of the content of dreams. One may, however, avoid such content suppression. By Freud's account, one's actual dreams are comprised of various cryptic symbols which can, in turn, be interpreted and made sense of. For example, an object may represent a thought or multiple thoughts; a thought or thoughts can be rendered as a visual image or images; a symbol can take the place of a person, place, thing, or idea; etc.

Perhaps we shouldn't be asking what dreaming in the first person or the third person means or reflects, but rather what each dream in its entirety says about the fulfillment of our wishes.