There are various levels of cannabis addiction, and only the very highest involve debilitating physical withdrawal symptoms. It is a progressive disease. Most people who smoke weed will never even come close to getting there, but it is possible to develop symptoms akin to mild opiate withdrawals.
I would classify the vivid dreams, maybe a little irritability when not using, as well as ego problems/aggression, and the need to have a stash on hand to be comfortable even if you arn't smoking it that much, as signs that a mild addiction is developing which could possibly progress over time into something more dangerous. Once you develop the compulsive drive to smoke another bong rip even though you are already high, or were just recently high, and it becomes an effort not to give into this, then you know you are on your way. Another sign of the weed taking over would be laziness, even when not stoned.
It took me many years to work my way up to countless untold massive vape and bong rips of oil, hash, and herb from morning until night. It got to the point where if I skipped my morning tokes, then after a mere couple of hours I would be in physical agony. It got to the point where I would need to go multiple days without eating any food whatsoever, resulting in slight malnourishment, in order to reduce my cannabis intake, because if I ate so much as a banana I would puke when it hit my digestive tract which was at a standstill. I would need to battle days insomnia. I would be so fucking incredibly depressed during the initial comedown from binging on the reefer, that I wouldn't even be able to get out of bed. I wasn't sad or anything, it's just that my receptors were downregulated to the point that my brain wasn't really able to operate. The withdrawals were of course physical in nature even in my brain. I was dead inside. I would need to battle extreme anxiety, manifesting in the form of heart palpitations and gut rot. Start puffing, I'd be cured.
Upon getting into it this deep, you wouldn't even have any vivid dream recall for probably around two weeks or so of abstinence. Back when I was only a mild addict, those dreams would come within a day or two of stopping. It wasn't ever a big deal back then, but nowadays, I need at least one week to recover and become a functional human being after stopping, and the withdrawals have become so severe that I am forced to taper off, using fractional amounts for maintenance, because total absinence results in near-psychosis.
Even for someone like me, it is pretty easy in theory to get out of the bad smoking habit. I have been recently watching some documentaries on heroin. The junkies were saying "I'm sick for 3 days. You think I'd want to just go through the sickness and then stop using. Why don't I do this? I just don't know. All I know is I wake up feeling sick every day, and I want to feel normal again." That could be said of my own habit. It's really ever only a few days of miserable torture, when every hour feels like an eternity. But a few days is all it takes. At that point I am no longer smoking herb to get high - I'm doing it to feel normal, so that I can eat food and get sleep. At the fucking expense of my intellect - smoking a lot of weed significantly impairs memory and concentration, that's obvious to anyone who gets really high all day and tries to do something productive. When you really get going with the bong rips, you'll lose yourself. I read without reading when I'm habitually stoned, it's impossible to have the same level of focus. It's easy to keep up this bullshit for ages, since pot culture of the day makes it easy for habitual abusers of the drug to live in denial - and I just had to have my fix, it made so much sense in the short term of things.
I still use the herb every day, but in much smaller amounts. A big old bong rip is not really for me anymore, I vaporize tiny amounts. The strength of my addiction decreases with each day, and my enjoyment of the holy herb has returned. I make sure only to use after I have come down and struggled a bit. Hopefully I will be able to use it once a week someday without having to go through hell on Earth. But staying clean once you're out is another thing altogether. It involves constant respect for the herb, intense moderation and awareness of dosages and dosage times, never ever letting yourself fall out of line. I never worried about this kind of stuff before, since I started using as a stupid teenager with little awareness, and that is how I got hooked. Cannabis is for responsible adults, not kids - starting early strongly increases your chances of ending up with problems controlling your use, in my opinion.
