Hi I’m John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube and did you
know that video games might be good practice for lucid dreaming?
According to studies conducted by Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University
in Canada, gamers spend so much time practicing virtual reality that they’re more likely
to be able to control actions in their dreams. Plus, in a study she did in 2008 with about
100 participants, she found that gamers were less prone to nightmares because they were
more willing to fight back during scary dreams.
And that’s the first of many facts about dreams that I’m going to share with you
today, in this video brought to you by Geico. It’s worth noting that scientists still
don’t know much about dreams, so these are just some things that they have studied and
observed. Alright, let's get to it!
According to a 1966 study in which people reported on their dreams, dreams are primarily
visual and auditory. Smell and taste sensations only occur less than 1% of the time.
But, interestingly, a 2009 study from the European Sleep Research Society found that
presenting smells to a sleeping person could affect their dreams. Positive smells, like
roses, produced positive dreams. And negative smells, like rotten eggs, gave more negative
dreams.
In the average lifetime a person will have over 100,000 dreams. That might include dozens
of dreams in a single night. But we only spend about 2 hours each night dreaming.
50% of people report having a recent precognitive dream, or a dream that seems to tell the future
but most experts believe that this phenomenon is due to the “law of large numbers.”
Basically, tons of stuff happens every single day, so it’s very probable that every once
in a while, something that happens will have been recently dreamt about.
A famous precognitive dream happened to Abraham Lincoln a few days before he was assassinated.
According to his friend, Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln told a small group that he dreamt
of a group of soldiers. He asked the group who died and a soldier responded, “The president.
He was killed by an assassin.” Whether Lamon was telling the truth...well that’s for
you to decide. Also how often did Lincoln probably dream about getting assassinated?
He was under constant threat of assassination. I shouldn't make jokes about your assassination
Abe Lincoln, you're my favorite bobblehead on the entire wall.
Another famous dreamer was Dmitri Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table, who claimed
that the idea came from a dream. He said, "I saw in a dream a table where all elements
fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper,
only in one place did a correction later seem necessary."
I have dreams for my books like that all the time and then I wake up and I write down exactly
what the dream told me to write down and then I read it like four hours later when I'm like
properly awake and it's awful.
People tend to remember more negative emotions than positive ones in dreams. This phenomenon
was observed by researcher Calvin S. Hall, who monitored dream accounts for more than
50,000 college students over the course of forty years. The most commonly reported feeling
from dreams:anxiety. I wasn't aware that you could feel something else from a dream.
According to a 1996 study conducted by William Domhoff, children between the ages of 9 and
11 only recall about 20-30% of their dreams. Adults, on the other hand, have a recall rate
of about 79%.
But, according to dream researcher J. Allan Hobson, we forget about 95% of our dreams.
So this is something that definitely needs to be studied more. As does so much of sleep
science. Generally the field of like dream studies sometimes suffers from a lack of intellectual
rigor.
Humans dream during both REM sleep and non-REM sleep, but babies are the champion of REM
sleep, spending over half their sleep time in REM. We don’t know if they’re really
dreaming all that time. But adults only spend about 20-25% of their sleep time in REM sleep
but we dream at least 4 to 6 times per night.
And though we think of them as little imagination factories. Children actually have fairly realistic
dreams. According to one study, about 29% of their dreams are realistic, around 47%
are realistic-fiction, and only 4% are purely fantastic. Those are all comparable with adult
dreams.
Now is it realistic, realistic fiction, or purely fantastical when I dream that I am
a banana on the space shuttle. Because I think there are bananas on the space shuttle, but
I'm unlikely to become one of them.
Anyway many people have reported that wearing a nicotine patch intensifies dreams.
A lot of people wonder how blind people dream. Experts have observed that if a person was
born blind or went blind at a young age, they typically only dream in smell, sound, taste,
and touch, not in sight. Those who go blind later in life, though, do have visual dreams.
There’s something known as hypnagogia, or a “wakeful dream.” This is when someone
is transitioning from being awake to being asleep. So, during this time, people technically
dream while they’re awake, which could mean anything from experiencing weird visuals and
sounds to hallucinating.
The Hawaiian word for “dream” translates to soul sleep. This is because ancient Hawaiians
believed that people were able to communicate with ancestors and gods while they slept.
Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians also considered dreams to be very important. Both societies
had dream interpreters who would tell the future based on a person’s dreams.
And in fact the Chester Beatty Papyri are manuscripts that contain the earliest known
dream dictionary. It was written in over 3000 years ago in ancient Egypt.
According to a 1996 study, between 60-75% of adults have recurring dreams. And women
are more likely to have them than men.
It might not feel like it, but we dream in real time. According to Dr. Rubin Naiman,
a psychologist who studies sleep at the University of Arizona, dreams can last anywhere from
a couple minutes to an hour.
Mammals and birds have REM sleep, so they probably dream. But reptiles probably don’t.
But if reptiles don't dream does Medusa dream? That's presumably what she and the Flash are
talking about.
According to a 2007 study conducted at the University of Montreal, new mothers are more
likely to have nightmares than pregnant women and women with no children. In fact, three-quarters
of women who recently gave birth had nightmares about bad things that might happen to their
baby.
When awakened while dreaming, people tend to report that their dreams contained vivid
color 70% of the time and vague color 13% of the time. But, outside of scientific studies,
only 25-29% of people say they dream in color. So, many of those people actually do dream
in color, but don't properly remember.
Interestingly, childhood exposure to black-and-white television affects whether people dream in
color. A 2008 study revealed that people who are 25-years-old or younger rarely report
dreaming in black and white. People who are older than 55, though, say they dream in black-and-white
fairly often. These findings were reversed in studies done in the 40s -- college students
claimed they rarely dreamed in color. So, scientists think TV might be involved.
Finally, I return to the salon to tell you that men dream about men more than women dream
about men. According to studies, 66% of the characters in men’s dreams are male. Whereas
the ratio of male to female characters in women’s dream is 50:50. And this phenomenon
is true across all cultures that have been observed so maybe it just says something about
men.
Thanks for watching this episode of Mental Floss on YouTube, which was made with the
help of all these nice people, and brought to you by Geico. If you’ve had any weird
dreams lately, share them in the comments. Because your friends and family don’t want
to hear about them. There's nothing less interesting than other people's dreams Anyway as we say in my hometown DFTBA!