From lucid dreaming to violent sleepwalking, today we look at 14 Facts About Dreams!
Number 14.
Years Spent Dreaming Since the average person sleeps between 6
and 8 hours per night, it is safe to conclude that you spend about a quarter of your life
dreaming.
While this is easy to deduce, it is not so easy to really wrap your head around.
To put it in perspective, someone created a tool which breaks down that amount of time
and shows what it means in comparison to other things.
For instance, by the time you reach 20 years old, you will have slept about 8 years of
your life.
That is equivalent to 73,242 hours.
During that time, about 92 hours were spent dreaming about money, 732 hours were spent
dreaming about sex, and 1831 hours were spent dreaming about happiness.
Your body could have burnt over 5,000,000 calories during that time, which is equivalent
to about 10,000 Big Macs!
Number 13.
Frozen In Place We’ve probably all had nightmares where
we can’t move a muscle.
Frozen in place, anxiety washes over you as you try desperately to break free from the
grasp of whatever has you.
Then you jerk awake, and the anxiety fades as you realize that you were only dreaming.
But what would you do if you woke up to find that you still couldn’t move?
This terrifying prospect does happen, and it’s called Sleep Paralysis.
Although a sole cause has not so far been discovered, theories range from neural functions
which control sleep being out of balance, to disturbance of a person’s regular sleep
patterns.
Whatever the cause, some people experience it sporadically, whereas in some cases Sleep
Paralysis is a persistent condition requiring therapy and medication to alleviate.
Number 12.
Sleep...killing?
Perhaps the opposite of sleep paralysis is sleepwalking.
Although this condition is often (a little too often) used as a plot device in movies
and television, it really does happen, and sometimes truth is a little scarier than fiction.
People have been known to do all sorts of things while they sleep.
From getting up and scaring the crap out of other people in the house to walking downstairs
every night for a snack (and only noticing when they start to put weight on) to truly
scary stuff.
In 1987, a man named Kenneth Parks got up in the middle of the night, went to his car,
drove 14 miles, and murdered his wife’s parents, all while asleep.
This was a landmark case because it proved that things like this can, in fact, happen
while sleepwalking.
It’s terrifying, but it was an amazing discovery which forwarded advancement of sleepwalking
knowledge a great deal.
Number 11.
Already Gone It is no secret that we tend to forget our
dreams pretty quickly after waking up.
You might have the most vivid dream experience while you are dreaming itself, but within
5 - 10 minutes after waking up and getting out of bed, the dream is gone.
Some people combat this by writing their dreams down the moment they wake up - keeping their
diaries is a pretty common technique to ensure that the details are not forgotten.
However, forgetting dreams seems to be just something that humans tend to do - dream researchers
today attribute this forgetfulness upon waking to the absence of a hormone called norepinephrine
in the cerebral cortex - the region of the brain which plays the biggest part in memory,
thought, and consciousness.
Number 10.
Blind Eye Have you ever thought about what it must be
like to be blind?
Imagine if you had never had the ability to see.
Would you even be able to imagine what it would be like to see the world?
Probably not, right?
Contrary to what many people think, being blind isn’t the same as just closing your
eyes.
It’s actually a lot more like how you can see out of the back of your head - namely,
you can’t.
You don’t see blackness back there, you just don’t see anything at all.
But if you were completely blind, and had been since birth, would you be able to dream?
Your knee jerk reaction might be to assume that no, the blind don’t dream.
This actually isn’t true, though.
The blind do dream, and many of them have dreams which are more vivid in many aspects
than those that are sight enabled.
For instance, many blind people report tasting things when they dream, and feeling touch
sensations.
On the other hand, however, blind people seem to report having nightmares more often than
their sight enabled peers.
Number 9.
Coming Online The expression “sleeping like a baby”
is a pretty common way to impart that someone is really getting their rest.
But are babies really “sleeping like a baby” when they’re conked out?
Are they having deep, restful sleep ((sessions)) complete with dreams?
As it turns out, babies do dream, but not exactly in the same way that they do in later
life.
Humans of all ages tend to dream about what they know, so researchers do believe that
babies tend to dream about things which they encounter in real life (animals, their parents
and siblings, etc), but babies don’t have the same kind of plot line to their dreams
that we have in later life.
This is largely because you only start to acquire a sense of self around the age of
5 - 7, so babies mostly dream about things, not linear events with beginnings, middles,
and ends.
Number 8.
Everyone, Every Night Have you ever met someone who claims that
they “just don’t dream”?
We probably all have at some stage - that person who insists that they only rarely dream,
or maybe even don’t dream at all.
Well, they actually might be wrong about that.
Research shows that everyone dreams, every night.
For the people who claim that they don’t dream, it may be that they simply forgot their
dreams the minute they woke up, leading to the impression that they didn’t have a single
dream at all.
In the study, 289 patients who suffer from rapid eye movement (REM) sleeping disorders,
several claimed that they had either never experienced a single dream in their life,
or had not experienced a dream in a significant amount of time.
However, when observed sleeping, all of these patients exhibited behavior which would indicate
that they were, in fact, dreaming.
Number 7.
It’s Black and White Some people dream in extremely vivid and almost
hallucinogenic detail and color.
Others, most of us in fact, dream in tones similar to everyday life.
New research shows, however that some people among us actually dream solely in black and
white.
The study shows that people 25 years of age and younger very, very rarely report dreaming
in black and white, while people 55 years of age and older are far more common to report
this phenomenon.
The cause?
It’s surprisingly simple, and almost funny.
The people who are 55 and older had a high exposure to black and white television broadcasts
throughout their life.
Number 6.
Not Just Humans If you’ve ever watched a dog or a cat kicking
its feet or wagging its tail while it's taking a nap, it’s pretty easy to conclude that
the little guy is dreaming.
But, do animals really dream after all?
And if so, what do they dream about?
As it turns out, virtually all mammals dream.
Dreaming as we know it is a byproduct of Rapid Eye Movement (REM), the stage of sleep where
people get the most rest.
Since all mammals are closely related on a genetic level, pretty much all of them have
these REM cycles.
The end result is that most mammals do, in fact, dream.
But what is Fido dreaming about, you ask?
Well, recent research by an MIT graduate shows that many animals have dreams as complex and
detailed as our own.
Specifically, observing the brain activity of sleeping rats showed the same centers of
the brain which engage while they are running, engaging while they are sleeping.
Number 5.
In Control Many people feel helpless while they dream
- this is especially true during nightmares.
When you are in the grip of terror in a dream, it is easy to feel like you don’t have any
control over what is happening to you.
But some people can do what is called Lucid Dreaming - where they're in full control over
the dream.
Think about this as if you were playing a video game with all of the cheat codes on
- you’d have the ability to do whatever you please.
The good news is that just about anyone can learn Lucid Dreaming with a little bit of
effort and practice.
In fact, there are whole communities built around the idea of teaching you how to do
it.
The first step is usually keeping a dream journal so you get in the habit of remembering
your dreams.
Number 4.
Getting Anxious Humans tend to be tangled bundles of emotion,
barely functioning throughout the day unless they focus on the task at hand and don’t
let their emotions take control.
At night, however, our emotional selves take control and we are at the mercy of whatever
thoughts and emotions we’ve been bottling up throughout our lives.
Happy people tend to have better dreams and less nightmares, but the fact remains that
all of us experience anxiety about things on a fairly regular basis.
The result is that anxiety is the most common emotion felt while dreaming, and because negative
emotions are more common than positive ones, most dreams are not what you would call pleasant.
That said, we tend to forget these dreams faster, and really good dreams tend to stick
in our memories a little longer.
Number 3.
Violent Fantasies Although we push for gender equality in our
everyday lives, the fact remains that men and women are different, physiologically as
well as mentally.
While neither gender is inherently better or worse than the other, there are differences
which the medical community does have to take note of.
When it comes to dreaming, men tend to dream differently than women.
For instance, men are far more likely to have dreams which involve physical violence, anger,
and aggression.
While the direct cause of this is not known as of yet, many researchers actually believe
that this could be the result of the society we live in, as opposed to a physical difference
between men and women.
Number 2.
Anything Is Possible Have you ever had a dream which later seemed
to come true?
If so, you’re not alone - as many as 38% of people have reported having at least one
dream which seems to predict the future at some time in their lives, and as many as 18%
of these people report having those dreams fairly regularly.
Now, whether these people are actually experiencing visions of the future, or else later remembering
their dreams in such a way that events seem to have been predicted by the dream is unknown,
but it’s an interesting thing to consider.
Many people have also experienced strong sensations of Deja Vu which they attribute to dreams
they’ve had previously.
Number 1.
Eureka Moment Many of us have solved a problem which we
were experiencing in real life while dreaming.
If you go to bed with something on your mind, it stands to reason that you might dream about
it.
When that happens, your brain explores different ways events might unfold, and sometimes you
come across a solution which will actually work in the real world.
What is less common, however, is actually changing your life as a result of a dream.
Even less common still is changing the world.
It does happen though, and some very famous people have had their big idea or break as
a result of a dream.
For instance, Larry Page, the co-founder of google, came up with the idea for ranking
web pages by the number and quality of incoming links in a dream.