When you're awake, you stretch the rubber band of your mind. When you're asleep, your rubber band relaxes. Day. Night. Day. Night. Stretch. Relax. Stretch. Relax.
This is why dreams speak in a language of opposites. In waking life you wear your shirt one way, and in dreamland you wear it inside out and backward. I once dreamed a diving board pointing sideways instead of jutting out over the pool. It makes sense when you think of the rubber band stretching and relaxing. Dreams feature opposites, not for the sake of being weird, but because that's their function. That's what dreams do. They compensate. They oppose. They restore the original shape. They pull back when the mind pushes forward.
Another way to think of dreams: they're like negatives of photographs. You've probably noticed that when you close your eyes, especially in bright sun, daylight leaves an after-image behind, a purplish ghost of the scene you were seeing just before you closed them, an internal reflection of an external reality. The after-image isn't a randomly distorted version. It's a systematically distorted version. In other words, it's not nonsense. Neither are dreams. They're bizarre and outlandish. But nonsensical? No. They make a certain sense. Dreams are systematic distortions.
Let me give you an example. I dreamed Mitt Romney was a luminous being. He appeared to me in my dream with a glowing starburst of white light emanating from his chest. Very bright and holy looking. Now, in waking life, I think Mitt Romney reeks of bullshit. And bullshit is the opposite of luminous.
The rubber band stretches. The rubber band relaxes.