Do dreams have to be interpreted to help you? No, they don't but you do have to remember them when you wake up. If you can remember them and better yet if you can write them down or draw an image from them you will sleep better and feel better and understand yourself better. Dreams put us in touch with our unconscious which knows much more about us than our waking self does. Dreams also see around corners and into the future. Some dreams come from even deeper levels than our own unconscious. They come from the collective unconscious. We're all connected through the collective unconscious.That's why thousands of people dreamt of 9/11 in the days and weeks before it happened.
We can even dream of lives we've had in other galaxies, in times before the big bang. Scientists tell us that dark matter is older than the big bang, that the absolute universe existed before the big bang, if there even was a such a singular event. Dreams are not limited by time and space, in dreams we can time travel to other worlds in what feels like other times. Dreams can speak to us about events billions of years in the past. This is partly because time doesn't exist. To say it another way, all time is happening at once in the unconscious and in the absolute universe. In the third dimension we agree to time being spread out in a linear way so that too many events don't manifest at once. Time acts like a shock absorber, a buffer, it spreads out events so our third dimensional heads don't explode.
Jung said this about dreams. I'm paraphrasing but it was something like this. If you could talk to someone who knows you better than anyone and who has your best interests at heart would you do it? Well you can. You can speak to your billion year old self every night in your dreams and learn what your conscious waking self is not seeing. Dreams complete the picture of a situation, point out what you're missing. It's true that dreams speak in symbols and this can make understanding the message. That's because the unconscious prefers symbols to words. Words limit consciousness, reduce it down, whereas symbols expand meaning. So let the images and symbols in your dreams work on you. Carry your dream images around during the day like little gifts and see what occurs to you spontaneously. Wait casually, softly, unhurriedly, for those moments of clarity or even those moments of aha.
Before you sleep tonight ask your unconscious for the gift of a dream and be open to time traveling.