Yes, I completely agree on this. Ultimately, I think it’s a matter of personal choice, as with other metaphysical questions. Some people would find it unscientific to believe that anything external to one’s consciousness could appear in a dream, because the current scientific paradigm is a materialist-mechanistic one. Personally I find this paradigm limiting and somehow stifling - I believe it is more an epistemological assumption than a scientific truth.
No, I wouldn’t! As you say, there’s awareness even in “ordinary” dreams, otherwise even recall would be impossible. There always is a conscious observer. The question for me is - are the forces that shape the dream and give life to the dream characters, completely blind and unconscious? You say that DC can “borrow” from my consciousness - that is, if I understand it correctly, they can use fragments of thoughts, memories and impressions to mimic conscious behaviour. But The process of assembling these fragments seems to me an incredibly complex one, a cognitive task of the highest order!