I think that violence and injury as still major symbols. Asking whether seeing DCs get hurt is bad is like asking whether all movies that mention injured people are bad.
Or maybe it’s more like making a group of three year olds watch a marathon of horror movies, and then asking them to play nicely with eath other. 
Three year olds are still learning at that age, and I dont believe anyone here is three still. But maybe seeing stuff like that subconsciously has an effect.
That was an analogy Steve, of course nobody here is three 
. I’m drawing an analogy between the effects of violent movies on children, and the possibility of abusing your dream characters having negative psychological consquences.
… or maybe abusing your DC’s might be beneficial … lol. I mean if it prevents someone from doing it in “reality” from them releasing there frustrations out … (kinda like beating up a pillow)
I do not necessarily believe this … I’m just saying for arguements sake… 
If it was a shared dream, and we hurt a DC who turned out to be a real person, wouldn’t that give the other person a nightmare?
I would think they would actually be easy in 3 ways…
1: While a DC has numerous responses, a real person might go “this is a dream?! Oh…My…God…” and fade from the dream or rub their hands together or something.
2: Give them a password, such as chicken. This helps contact them later, if you know them.
3: You generally have to concentarte to make a real person appear, such as with a special place or a door energy. Like
Sky Island
Lunar and Solar island.
Lucid crossroads.
There’s a difference between screaming at yourself, and punching a pillow - one is directed outwards, the other in. I know what you’re saying though, but I believe there are better ways of releasing your frustrations than beating up on dream characters. Self integration with DC’s would have to be the more beneficial and rewarding option.
Reality is relative - It’s what you’ve learned to accept in the waking life.
I think there is a certain degree of randomness when it come to dream characters - that is, your brain can arbitrarily assign levels of conscious to characters in your dream - making them seem like entities from the waking world (realistic entities). However, just because they have been assigned high levels of consciousness, doesn’t mean they are ‘real’ in the sense of a seperate consciousness like in the real world.
Now I can argue that dream characters are not real because dreamers are often able to will characters to say things or act in a certain way. Often we don’t realise we are controlling them, but nevertheless they seem to follow our expectations.
Snape, i know it was just an analogy. I wsa just trying to say that your example involving three year olds cant compare to anyone on this site. Nobody here will imitate what they see in their dreams after they wake up, as a three year old would imitate something the see in a movie, or anywhere else.
I guess I’ve had experiences with both possibilities.
On the real person side: I had an LD where I became lucid while with a good friend of mine inside a house. I told her I was dreaming. She told me she was dreaming too. Probably just a DC messing with me. After all, she said she knew she was dreaming, and I seriously doubt this friend knows anything about lucid dreaming. But since I never asked her about it, I guess I can’t totally rule out dream sharing. The dream faded really quickly, unfortunately, so I didn’t get to talk to her any more to judge what her personality was like.
On the aspect of subconscious side: I recieved some news one day that scared me a lot. I was trying not to think about it as hard as I could. When I went to sleep that night, I dream that I was in a knife fight with a couple other dream characters, and I remember killing one of them. The next day, my anxiety was pretty much gone. Coincidence? Possibly, but it still made me think a lot about how DCs could affect your mind.