Try lucid dreaming. Turn action struggles into drowning people in boiling rock.
I've tried, but have never succeeded at lucid dreaming. I rarely wake up with any awareness that I dreamed at all. It's why I hate sleep so much. It feels like throwing time into an empty void. Like I just cease to exist for a few hours. I close my eyes. I open my eyes. There's nothing in-between.
Except when I work overtime, apparently.
Lucid dreaming takes practice, though if you are having trouble remembering your dreams at all then that's probably the first step to overcome. As for why you have been having this spike in dream activity, it's probably because you are REM deprived. In order to be fully refreshed (REM wise) a person needs 7-8 hours of sleep. Any less then that and you build up sleep debt which is paid off by having more REM sleep periods when you do sleep. More REM periods = more dreams.
Also if you do want to remember your dreams better there are a few things you can do:
1)Wake up with an alarm clock or some other sudden way of waking up. When you wake up gradually part of the process involves your brain moving out of REM sleep, which makes it much harder to remember your dreams. If you are woken straight out of REM sleep then everyone (even those who normally don't remember their dreams), can recall their dreams. While you can't do this totally accurately outside of a lab, you can help it happen a little more often.
2)Sleep at least 8 hours regularly, while sleep debt can cause more vibrant dreams, it does so by stealing the dreams from your other nights. As you sleep longer your REM periods become more frequent and longer, which increases the chance of you being woken during one, and thus remembering your dreams.
3)Jot down anything you remember of your dreams, even if it's just a little note, as soon as you wake up. Many times even if you remember your dreams you will lose the memories in the first half hour or so. After a while of doing this you can train your brain to remember dreams if you want, personally I can take 2-3 min right after I wake up and 'fix' my dream's memory in my mind now, but it took several months to reach that point.
Dreaming is really quite enjoyable once you reach the point where you can remember it, for me it's not too different from getting the chance to watch a new movie every night!