Dreams can be fascinating, scary, or just plain weird. See what the latest research has discovered about dreams. I leave you with 10 fun facts about dreams:
1) Dreams last between 5 and 20 minutes.
Women, men, babies, everyone dreams. Even those who say they don't dream. In fact, researchers have found that people typically have multiple dreams each night, each lasting between 5 and 20 minutes. During a lifetime, people spend an average of six years dreaming!
2) 95% of dreams are forgotten.
According to the research of an American psychiatrist and sleep researcher, J Allan Hobson, up to 95 percent of all dreams are quickly forgotten shortly after waking up.
Why are our dreams so hard to remember? According to one theory, changes in the brain that occur during sleep are not compatible with information processing and storage. Brain scans applied to sleeping people have shown that the frontal lobes, the area that plays a key role in memory formation, are inactive during REM sleep, the stage in which dreams occur.
3) Some people dream in black and white.
Not all dreams are in color. While approximately 80 percent of all dreams are in color, there is a small percentage of people who claim that they dream in black and white.
4) Men and women have different dreams.
Researchers have found a number of differences between men and women when it comes to the content of their dreams. In one study, men reported more aggressive dreams than women.
According to the researcher William domhoff, women tend to have fewer dreams but longer than men and with more characters. The characters that appear in men's dreams tend to be mostly men while women tend to dream of both sexes equally.
5) Animals probably dream too.
Have you ever seen a dog wag its tail or paws while they sleep? Although it is difficult to say for sure if the animal is truly dreaming, the researchers believe that it is likely that the animals dream too.
Like humans, animals also go through stages of sleep that include sleep cycles.
6) You can control your dreams.
A lucid dream is one in which the subject is aware that he is dreaming even though he is still asleep. During this type of sleep, you can often control the content of the dream.
About half of people can remember at least one instance of lucid dreaming, and some people can have lucid dreams quite often.
7) Negative emotions are more common in dreams.
For more than forty years, the researcher Calvin S Hall recorded the stories of 50.000 dreams of college students.
These stories reveal that many emotions are experienced during dreams: joy, happiness, and fear. The most common emotion experienced in dreams was anxiety, and negative emotions in general are much more common than positive ones.
8) How do the blind dream?
People who lost their sight before the age of five generally do not have visual dreams in adulthood. Despite the lack of visual effects, the dreams of the blind are as complex and intense as those of any other normal person. Instead of visual sensations, blind people's dreams often include information from the other senses, such as sound, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.
9) When you dream, your body becomes paralyzed.
Sleep occurs during the REM phase and is characterized by paralysis of the voluntary muscles. Why? The phenomenon is known as "REM atony" and prevents you from acting while you are asleep. Basically because motor neurons are not stimulated. Your body does not move.
In some cases, this paralysis can be prolonged in the waking state for ten minutes. This symptom is known as sleep paralysis. Have you never woken up from a scary dream and been left paralyzed? This experience can be terrifying. Experts claim that it is perfectly normal and can last only a few minutes before your body returns to normal.
10) Many dreams are universal.
Dreams are often highly influenced by our personal experiences. However, researchers have found that certain themes are very common among people. For example, many people often dream that they are being chased, attacked, or falling off a cliff. Other common dream experiences include moments when the person dreams that they cannot move, that they are late, they fly, and then there is the mythical dream in which you find yourself naked in the middle of the street.