Dreampunk is a niche genre of speculative fiction that asks the question "Is this real?" and then follows up with "What does that even mean anyway?"
Alice in Wonderland would be the prototypical example, but any anti-authoritarian investigation into...
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Cyberpunk, dieselpunk, steampunk... dreampunk? Unlike its better established siblings, this fledgling genre is not rooted in technology or the reimagining of a different era. It's a trippy subgenre of speculative fiction focused on dreamlike states and their interaction with consensus reality. It often overlaps with irrealism and sometimes with cyberpunk.
Dreampunk fiction often makes use of surreal imagery, esoteric symbolism, dream logic (which may not be entirely logical), dream-related technology, false/subjective realities, shamanism, and Jungian psychology. It might be described as a more mystical, less technocentric version of cyberpunk, but dreampunk also draws from postmodern literary fiction and winds up somewhere in the neighborhood of transrealism and the new weird.
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The prototypical dreampunk story has got to be Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. The Alice stories have a good deal in common with steampunk, except there isn't much focus on technology and the main action takes place within a dream. And while Alice may not fit your idea of a modern punk, she certainly was rebellious, eccentric, confrontational... kind of a punk for the Victorian era.
In contrast to Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World, there is no indication in the original stories that Oz is anything other than a real place—albeit magical and very well hidden. That said, the classic film adaptation did present Oz as a sort of dream, populated as it was with fantastic counterparts to Dorothy's real-world acquaintances. So L. Frank Baum's novella The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not a good example of proto-dreampunk on its own, but MGM's film adaptation kind of turned it into one.
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This is not to say that every dreampunk story must take place within the framework of a literal dream. A dream could be the waking life of a character who is mentally ill, or perhaps just extremely imaginative. Or it could be the result of a hallucinogenic drug, hypnotic mind control, or divine revelation. In one form or another, this "dreaming" should play an important role, perhaps affecting consensus reality or even in some way supplanting it. This brings me to the work of Philip K. Dick.
