First, a quick aside about Meta:

Meta- (from Greek: μετά = "after", "beyond", "with", "adjacent", "self"), is a prefix used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.

In epistemology, the prefix meta is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata are data about data (who has produced them, when, what format the data are in and so on). Similarly, metamemory in psychology means an individual's knowledge about whether or not they would remember something if they concentrated on recalling it. Furthermore, metaemotion in psychology means an individual's emotion about his/her own basic emotion, "or somebody else's basic emotion."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta

Now, on to dreams and what we know about a dream that isn't really a part of the dream.

I recently awoke from a dream that really was only about one movie scene long. I was in a car with several other folks. I knew we were a band and we were on our way to a gig. I also knew that the driver of the car was not a normal part of our band. As we were driving along, I knew that our regular bassist had been badly injured in a wreck and this was his temporary replacement. All of this happened within a couple of seconds of the dream starting.

The car then pulled into an abandoned mall, the driver was taking a short cut and we ended up in the back, behind the stores, in a large empty lot. Then the driver got out and started to run away. The rest of us found our seat belts were locked, pinning us in place, doors locked too. Fortunately, I had a tool for surviving water crashes, something like this one. I cut my belt and broke the window, handing the tool to one of the other band members while I got out to chase the driver. I didn't get far before the car exploded, knocking me to the ground and ending the dream.

But not, it should be noted, the knowledge of the dream. And here is where Meta comes in.

The first part of the Meta-data about this dream is somewhat understandable. I know that, in this dream, I had a day job and that day job was an analyst for a government agency. Not a spy, but someone who collated and synthesized information for a spy agency. Not James Bond, not even Q, just someone who works in the bowels of a cubicle farm. Of course, this information would be available to the character in the dream regardless because it was a priori knowledge. No, the more interesting meta-data came after I woke up when I suddenly understood why the scene I had dreamed had happened.

Our band, while not good enough to give up the day job for, was a fairly well-established band with a steady set of gigs. One of our upcoming gigs, not the one we were on our way to but the next week's, was going to have some guests at it that were targets of some group. The group could have been international terrorists or business terrorists ala Die Hard but that I didn't know. What I did know was that our bass player's "accident" was actually nothing less than a means to get the new bass player in place to eliminate our band so that another band could take our place.

And that's really interesting information. It's almost as if I had read a synopsis on IMDB of a movie that I had caught a single scene of. All of the information in that last paragraph is a posteriori information, that would only be gained after that scene in watching the rest of the movie play out. And it could have been an interesting read/movie. The character would have needed to discover (and probably foil) the plot. Odds are good that he would have had to pretend to be dead and use resources outside of anything available in his job.

But where did the information come from? I don't know, but it's a fascinating question.