I think this type of dream is what you might call ‘almost lucid’; it has a lot of the similarities of lucid dreaming, knowing what you know in waking life, yet you still aren’t aware that you are dreaming. There are probably other labels for it but it’s basically your conscious mind having a close connection with your unconscious mind, either by accident or by design – probably the former. It could be that these types of dreams need extra assistance in getting their message across to you, achieving this by dipping into your conscious memory; this sounds a bit confusing because memory is just memory really, but the brain tends to keep certain types of thoughts for dreaming and other, more clear thoughts for when you are awake – but for some dream messages the subconscious-type imagery isn’t sufficient to resolve certain issues, so your brain will try and enhance them (the images) with more recognizable (to you) conscious memories. Does that make any sense?