Amazing Facts About Dreams

Sleep Paralysis

If you thought nightmares were bad, sleep paralysis is your worst nightmare turned reality. It’s an occurrence in which a person temporarily experiences the inability to move or talk either while falling asleep or waking up.

The transitional state between wakefulness and sleep is hard to decipher and people usually feel like they’re dreaming except they’re one hundred percent awake. It is accompanied by terrible hallucinations of supernatural entities in the room and the individual being attacked or suffocated.

The individual is usually immobilized and has difficulty breathing. It can be horrifying for those who have never experienced sleep paralysis, although there are a number of ways to prevent it, like avoiding sleeping on your back and getting sufficient amount of sleep.

Rapid Eye Movement

REM or rapid eye movement is the stage where your body is paralyzed to give it the most amount of time to rest. REM is important when dreaming because it keeps your body immobilized to prevent you from moving while you sleep.

However, some people don’t reach that stage and there have several incidents of people acting out their dreams. Some cases have resulted in broken legs or arms from the individual. Some people have broken furniture and hurt others. The strangest case is of one individual who burnt their house down.

Pets Can Dream

Like people, animals go through multiple stages of sleep. REM sleep or rapid eye movement is where most dreaming occurs and cats and dogs can have multiple dreams as well. Cats will experience REM every 25 minutes and dogs vary depending on their size.

Larger dogs like Golden Retrievers might dream every 45 minutes for five minutes, while smaller dogs might dream every 10 minutes with dreams lasting less than two minutes.

More importantly, what do our pets dream about? Studies show that they also dream about actual experiences as well, such as chasing a mouse or playing in the park.

Black and White Dreams

While we see in color, some people have claimed to dream in black and white. This is more common in people over fifty five years old who grew up with limited access to color television. At least 12 percent of people report dreaming in black and white.

As color television became more popular, this number dropped. Currently the new generation such as college students don’t report dreaming in black and white at all.

Blind People Dream

Blind people do in fact dream, however what they dream may differ depending on the individual. If a person was born blind since birth they will only have auditory dreams. An auditory dream is only with sounds and no images.

So basically, the dreams of someone who was born blind will dream of the same things with no pictures. If a person with born with a measure of sight before becoming blind, they can dream up images.

However what they see depends on the person as well. Some blind people can see blurry faces or various colors.

Real Life Encounters

Sometimes when we dream, we may see faces of people that we don’t recognize. Even though our mind seems to make up these faces, in reality every unknown face in your dream is someone you’ve seen in real life.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you may know this individual, but you may have seen them in a movie trailer or passing you by on the street.

We have seen more than a million faces in our lives, so it’s hard to keep track of who we actually know. Our brain associates these faces with familiarity so we have a never ending amount of characters for our minds to create during our dreams.

Premonitions

It’s a strong warning feeling that something bad is about to happen, and many people have experienced premonitions in their dreams.

People will spend at least a third of lives sleeping so having premonition dreams are not uncommon. Dreams give us an insight into our subconscious, so sometimes we can feel like something is going to happen before it actually happens.

Some people have had premonitions of real life events such as the titanic sinking, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and premonitions of their life.

If it happens, don’t feel guilty that you couldn’t have stopped it. Some premonitions may never occur at all.

Dreams are lost

You usually forget 90% of dreams within the first five minutes of waking up. Dream recall is much harder to do if you don’t move after waking up, because you can fall right back asleep.

There are also several techniques to help an individual practice dream recall. Writing down your dreams in a dream journal can help you remember important details in the dream such as colors, sounds and dialogue. Or if you feel too sleepy to wake up from your dreams, set an alarm to wake you up at a time that you are most likely dreaming.

Dream Inspired Ideas

Sometimes dreams don’t make sense at all, but sometimes a good’s night rest and some creativity is all you need to get that light bulb shining in your head. With that said, there a few inventions that were inspired by dreams. For example, the idea of the sewing machine came to inventor Elias Howe when he had a violent murder dream in which he was stabbed.

Famous director James Cameron dreamed up the movie Terminator when he was sick with a fever and dreamt of a robot coming out of a fiery explosion.

Other inventions that were inspired by dreams include Larry Page’s Google company, James Watson’s DNA double helix spiral form and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Anxiety Stems From Dreams

Dreams of unpreparedness, falling down, embarrassment, teeth falling and flying all arise from common anxieties we experience in daily lives. For example if you have a dream of failing a test, that may exhibit your worries about wanting to pass an exam.

Your dreams are affected by emotions and thoughts so dream anxiety is quite normal. Content in dreams can occur anytime in life, but is more focused on recent activities on what you did. So, if you’re very stressed, your dreams will reflect that state of mind.

Dream Déjà vu

It’s defined as experiencing something we perceive to have happened before, even though we have no memory of it happening. Many of us have revisited specific places in dreams and even though we may dream about it; it may not look as accurate as we remember it. For example, you have dream deja vu when your house doesn’t look like your house, but you know it’s still your house due to your gut instinct.

One study of memory consolidation showed that dreaming may promote creation of false memories through feelings of familiarity. Everything just looks familiar because we make it associate it with things we’ve seen before it. It’s easy to see how certain places have captured a personal significance for the dreamer.

Sleepwalking

It’s a behavior that’s exhibited during deep sleep and results in the person walking or doing activities. It’s mostly common in younger children, however some adults do sleepwalk. It’s more likely to occur if the person is sleep deprived and the person will have a difficulty remembering the sleepwalking episode because they were not awake at the time.

This stage happens before the REM sleep in which dreaming takes place. Basically we can control our bodies without having any actual responsibility for what we do. It can be scary and fascinating at the same time.

Drugs

Drugs, legal or illegal can have a factor on how you dream as well as vitamins. Different drugs can cause different affects.

Some people on certain medications have had more intense REM sleep than others, while antidepressants are known to cause frequent nightmares.

Vitamin B6 is also a popular supplement for dreams, creating more vivid and longer dreams. Illegal drugs such as MDMA and LSD have also been a cause for bizarre and unexplainable dreams.

Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dreaming is when the dreamer is aware that they’re dreaming. During lucid dreaming, the individual can take control of the dream and change the setting and how it plays out.

There are two ways to achieve lucid dreams. The first way is that it can be induced while already dreaming, involving the dreamer to realize they are dreaming through dream realizations.

The second way is rather hard, but to practice consciousness from the awakened state to the sleep state. Lucid dreaming can take time to master if you’ve never done it before so keep practicing!

Astral Projection

It is defined as out of body experience that separates the astral body from the physically and enables one to travel outside of it.

Since there is no scientific evidence that there is any manifestation of a consciousness or soul, astral projection is difficult to prove.

Practitioners describe the experience as euphoric with intense energy. When separating from the body, the astral soul is able to travel to different planes of existence in the material universe.

Astral projection is observed in various cultures like ancient Egypt, Japan and India.