A dream that keeps coming back is a message that keeps being sent, and something in you keeps refusing to read it. That is the short answer to the question behind the query. The longer answer, and the more useful one, comes from three traditions that each looked at the same phenomenon and reached different conclusions.
What Freud would say
Freud's account of dreams, set out in The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, is that a dream is a disguised wish. The mind wants something, finds the wanting unacceptable or painful, and so dresses it up in the imagery of the manifest dream. The latent content, the real wish, is hidden behind the symbols of the manifest content through what Freud called condensation and displacement.
A recurring dream fits that framework almost too neatly. If a wish is not granted, or not acknowledged, the dream repeats because the work of disguise has not achieved its purpose. The pressure of the wish has not been discharged. The dream will keep returning, in Freud's terms, until the latent content is brought to light and dealt with. He discussed Artemidorus in the opening survey of earlier writers, but his own method was backward-looking rather than predictive. The dream is not a map of the future. It is an archaeology of the present, a buried wish that has become a site of excavation.
Artemidorus: the dream as a measure of the dreamer
Artemidorus, writing in the 2nd century in the Roman Empire, took a very different position. He distinguished the oneiros, a dream bearing meaning about what is to come, from the enhypnion, a dream that merely reflects the dreamer's present state. Dreaming of food when hungry was, for him, an enhypnion: a direct mirror of the body, not a prophecy.
A recurring dream would likely sit in an odd place on his map. If it keeps returning, it may be an oneiros pressing on something real. But Artemidorus insisted that the meaning of any symbol depends on the dreamer's trade, status, health and circumstances. The same dream means different things to a sailor and a magistrate. So a recurring dream of falling means one thing to a roof repairer, another to a magistrate fearful of losing office, and another to a sailor who has actually fallen from a mast. The recurrence is not the message. The message is the dream as refracted through the particular life of the dreamer.
Ibn Sirin's tradition, the Islamic art of ta'bir, is closer to Artemidorus than to Freud in this respect. It treats interpretation as analogy, not as knowledge of the unseen. The tradition associated with Ibn Sirin, who died in Basra in 728 CE under the Umayyads, is careful and conditional. A symbol means something in one context and something else in another. Water may be mercy in one reading and trial in another. The interpreter's task is to weigh the dreamer's circumstances as much as the dream.
Within that frame, a recurring dream is a sign of emphasis, not of fixed meaning. It is a theme the dreamer has not finished with. The tradition would not promise that the dream predicts a particular event. It would say that the dreamer is being asked to consider a matter more than once, and that the consideration itself is part of the point.
Where the three collide
The three traditions disagree in ways that matter.
Freud sees recurrence as a failure of resolution. The wish is denied, the disguise fails, and the dream returns. The remedy is insight, usually in the form of therapy that brings the latent content into conscious thought.
Artemidorus would not necessarily see recurrence as a failure. He saw dreams as responsive to the dreamer's state. A returning dream might simply be tracking a chronic condition of the dreamer's life, a situation that is itself unresolved. The dream is a barometer of a pressure that persists.
The tradition of Ibn Sirin would add a moral dimension. Interpretation is conditional and attentive. A recurring dream might be a call to examine one's conduct, to repent, or to reconsider a course of action. But it is not a decree. The tradition explicitly holds that interpretation is analogy, not certainty.
None of the three would tell you simply to wait. All three, in their different ways, treat the recurring dream as a prompt to look harder at the life you are actually living.
What to do with a dream that will not leave
If you have woken from a recurring dream, the first step is to write it down in as much detail as you can, including how it feels, not just what happens. Then ask Artemidorus' question: what is this dream for a person in your situation? The same falling dream has different weight for a climber and an office worker. Ask Freud's question: what might I be wanting here, that I have not allowed myself to want? Ask the question associated with Ibn Sirin: what in my life is asking for attention and for a moral reckoning?
The dream itself is not an oracle. It is a text, and the text only points. The meaning is in the reading, and the reading is yours to do.
A dream that will not leave is usually a matter that will not rest. That is the honest version of the old idea that a recurring dream carries a message. The message is not a prediction. It is an invitation to look again at something you have looked at many times and put away unresolved.
The dream will keep coming until you do. That is not a promise of prophecy. It is simply what a stubborn dream does.
A dream that repeats is a question that has not been answered. The answer is not in the dream. It is in the life you bring to it.
You woke up with the dream again this morning. The question is not what the dream means in general. The question is what it is asking of you, in particular.