When spirits manifest in your dreams why would they change their appearance?

From childhood until now I've always (except for a few years in my early 20's) paid serious attention to my dreams. Many around me would suggest I ignore it and 'brush it under the carpet'. The nightmares were horrible and they were always recurring. Only when I would pray before I got to sleep would they delay for a while, recur as a new nightmare and when that stopped the older nightmares came back. I would always 'sense' something was in my room at night no matter where we moved and I had a fear of corners of the room especially. Because of this I developed anxiety from toddler to adult ie. constant bed wetting until the age of 8, biting of fingernails constant fear of authority (which caused a bit of rebellion in teenhood). What made the anxiety worse was being placed in a European centered catholic all girls school where most of the student population was of a higher income bracket...which created absolute distrust.. especially of authority (teaching staff who were ethnically biased and class conscious).

As a child most people in my dreams appeared white (due to brainwashing on tv, school and story books).. if they didn't it was because they were family members or friends.
At the age of 19 I made friends with a middle aged woman who seemed to be having spiritual problems concerning her mother in law. I was naive to this kind of knowledge and was more leaning towards atheism more than anything. The dreams then became 'meaningless' and I didnt want to hear anything about spirituality. You see my parents were so brainwashed in 'the system' that they encouraged us to 'numb' intuition. Their motto was 'what would everyone think?'.

For a few years this woman would tell me the stories and like a dear friend I was a good listener. I never told her it was nonsense because I always believed that people will believe what they want and if that's her therapy then so be it. It was when she told me in desperation she went to a pundit (Hindu) and his revelation on her life was when I was taken by surprise. Long and short of it I started paying him a visit (which is a bit strange here because you don't see much people of African descent here seeing a pundit for anything..it is usually seen as 'devil business'). He would interpret my dreams to the letter...amazingly..he was always right. I started becoming interested in the Hindu faith and astrology (which many around me found was weird and disapproved). My mother hoped it was a phase and that I would come right back to Christianity. My father (skeptic/agnostic disenchanted former Anglican alter boy) hoped it wasn't some cult I was interested in.
The people in my dreams became East Indian and the characters in the dreams could have been matched to Hindu folklore. I was introduced to a tarot reader (Venezuelan) by a co worker and she was right on the ball as well. At this time I was introduced to Buddhism (Nichiren) and the Venezuelan psychic and I were both members. I was also showing interest in Wicca.

In the meantime the characters in my dreams were Caucasian, Indian or Hispanic. I never questioned this because I believed that everything happens for a reason.

As of last year a friend introduced me in the Orisa tradition. He had an issue with a black person not being involved in any African type spirituality whatsoever. I started visiting the Ile and made offerings and was recently initiated. From the beginning of this year I started seeing African people in my dreams. I had a dream where a black child was being rambunctious and I offered to give him light (spiritual cleansing) and he accepted and he calmed down. His brother looked at me and said 'how did you do that?'

Right now my spirituality is not fixed in one way. As the psychic stated my spiritual views are open.

My question is this, if spirits have no definite shape or form why would they switch identities in dreams. Should it matter? Why don't they just appear as something else like rays of light for instance? What are they trying to say?