I don't think dreams have a hidden meaning. There is nothing hidden about the French language, but it may not be understandable if we have not learned to associate meaning to the sounds. Also dreams arise from an ancient part of our nature that did not have language so expresses in what it associates with the people and objects you dream about.
As an example I was recently asked by a man who had given no thought to dreams how on earth you could extract any meaning from them. He was wearing a fairly old T-shirt, so I said, "OK, lets imagine you dreamt of your T-shirt, what would you make of that?"
After a while he said, "I don't know that I would make anything of it."
My response was to say, "Right, but now tell me where you bought the T-shirt, and what memories it has for you." Whereupon he told me, with some hesitation his memories of being abroad, and that the shirt was part of memories that he didn't want to talk about. Not only did he realise he had very powerful associations with the T-Shirt, but he wanted to hide them.
The important point is that everything we see and deal with, every person, every imagined scene, has such a background of feelings and perhaps memories. It is exactly this background of feelings and information that the dream weaves its story from. It is these associations that are the language of our dreams. To understand them you need to become aware of the usually unconscious feeling responses you have in connection with every thing, place, perseon and animal you fill your dreams with.
So I am certain that if we could explore our unconscious every dream has meaning. But of course many people who try to understand dreams are exploring them from a very rational state of mind, never having ventured into their unconscious.
Tony