There's also another way this could happen.
In my app I have a main module that takes care of the ui-router state management, config, and things like that. The actual functionality is all defined in other modules.
I had defined a module
angular.module('account', ['services']);
that had a controller 'DashboardController' in it, but had forgotten to inject it into the main module where I had a state that referenced the DashboardController.
Since the DashboardController wasn't available because of the missing injection, it threw this error.