The contrast between REM dreams, non-REM dreams, and the waking state
I've recently watched a really interesting documentary about the science of dreams, where they used machines to monitor people's brainwaves and wake them up from various stages of sleep to find out what their dreams were about. What I've learned from this is:
Non-REM dreams are commonly things having to do with the past. Not necessarily about a recent past or a past that you even remember, but perhaps its your subconscious mind piecing together all its information. I definitely feel that whenever I wake up from a non-REM dream, there's no sense that anything was really happening, more like I was just in a deep state of thought. I usually get the sense that I was having some important revelation about my self, my feelings, or something similar. It's kind of like deep meditation, except that meditation is meant to focus on the "now" which is why you need to be awake to meditate. NREM is like your subconscious meditating on the past.
REM dreams are always much more active, they have a sense of something happening or more accurately, something about to happen. REM dreams are dreams about the future. It is your subconscious creating possible futures and playing them out in your mind, and your body needs to be paralyzed in this state to prevent you from acting it out. I think the reason why REM dreams are almost always weird, random, or plain chaotic, is because in this state your mind doesn't have any concept of the past or present, therefore the rules and logic of the real world do not apply.
When I experience a REM dream, I don't get the sense of "this happened, that happened", neither do I get the sense of "this happening, that happening". Rather I get the sense that everything I think is about to happen, happens. If it's an outcome I don't like I'll usually go back and rethink what the outcome is several times until it becomes something I am happy with, this is how I often experience "rewinds" in my dreams, where I play the same scene over and over in different ways trying to create the ideal outcome.
Then the waking state is, of course, about the present. The present is what we perceive as the one true reality. It is the consequence of everything that occurred in the past, and everything we hope to happen in the future. Because the past and future are such important aspects of the present state of mind, maybe the purpose of our dreams is to help guide us in living out the present. Maybe all of our decisions in waking life are, on a subconscious level, determined by our dreams.
