Plan: Dreams and philosophical realism

REM versus non-REM sleep dreaming

Distinct types of dreams have been identified for REM and non-REM sleep stages. The vivid bizarre dreams that are commonly remembered upon waking up are primarily associated with REM sleep. Deep (stage 3 and 4) slow-wave sleep (NREM sleep) is commonly associated with more static, thoughtful dreams.^[43] These dreams are primarily driven by the hippocampus in the process of long-term memory consolidation and predominantly include memories of events “as they happened” without the random novel combination of objects seen in REM sleep dreams. The rest of the article focuses on REM sleep dreaming, thereafter simply referred as dreaming.