Polar Bear Dream

My sleep cycle has been pretty wacky lately because of work, and that generally results in my mind going a little wacky, which it has.
The other night I have vivid dreams. I mean VIVID, like they really stuck with me.
I dreamt that I was driving home alone from Edmonton, and I pulled into one of those half abandoned little towns that line the Yellowhead. I decided to go for a walk up and down the Main Street, and I noticed a little alley way that seemed to lead into a courtyard of sorts.
The courtyard turned out to be the ruins of some buildings long since abandoned, and the walls were all pink and red, and covered in Pagan writings. I was scavenging around because there was a lot of cool old stuff laying around, when I found myself entering a long dark cave. There was nothing in the cave, and when I turned to leave, there was a young polar bear growling at me like a vicious dog would.
It kept lunging at me, and I found a sharpened wooden stake to keep the bear at bay. The bear kept changing in size, from cub to full grown, and circling me, making the occassional hungry lunge. The cave also kept cycling from light to dark to pitch black, from warm to cold. This seemed to go on for hours, until a forest ranger came into the cave and picked up what had turned into a little bear cub and took it away, leaving me feeling pretty foolish.
So this dream really confused me, and I told my wife about it when I woke up, and I told my coworker about it at work, and then I told one of the waitresses and she got all freaked out because she had also had a dream about being trapped in her house by a polar bear that kept circling her. This also freaked me out a bit as well, and after the initial creepiness of it, I was kind of tickled by it.
But I'm still confused as to what the dream means.
I don't believe that dreams are any sort of prognostication or mystic communique. I'm more inclined to see them as the primal mind opening a window on to the subconscious through metaphor and simile.
To interpret my dream, I then need to think about what polar bears could possibly be a metaphor for with me, and to do this, I need to brainstorm everything I know about polar bears.
-they live in the snow
-they have hair that keeps water away from their skin and preserves heat
-if you eat their liver you can die of a Vitamin A overdose
-they are one of the only predators that will actually track and hunt down a man.
-in Churchill MB people take the corners wide when walking the streets for fear they may run into a polar bear.
-they are white and have black noses
-they have the cutest babies of anything. Period.
-they are mean
-I fear them
-they eat fish and seals and people
-they weigh a lot
-they are strong

My first inclination is to view the bear as a harbinger of winter, and the dream itself as a reminder to me that I have a fight against winter ahead of, that might result in my death if I'm not careful. I'm talking about how I lose my will to live in the winter, and I think this bear might symbolize that I'm actually quite scared of how bad I'll get over the dark months.
Anyway, that's all for today. Comments and feedback welcome.