Interesting things about dreaming…

I remember I have posted couple of times about dreams. It’s not that I study about dreams or anything but this topic comes into me randomly. 🙂 There are so many amazing facts that we don’t know about dreams but yet we dream every night. You may say “nah, sometimes I don’t see dreams in my sleeps”, as the facts say, if you think you are not dreaming, it’s because you just completely forget your dreams. If you google then you can find so many stuff about dreams but I don’t think all of it are true. Here are some of the facts I found out recently.

•  Within 5 minutes of waking half of the dream is forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone. (But I have few unforgettable dreams and I bet you also have 🙂 So I think we need a better explanation there.)

• People who became blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion.

• Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder). Our mind is not inventing faces. In our dreams we see real faces of real people that we have seen during our life but may not know or remember. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces throughout our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams.

• A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. Studies from 1915 through to the 1950s maintained that the majority of dreams were in black and white, but these results began to change in the 1960s. Today only 4.4% of the dreams of under-25 year-olds are in black and white. Recent research has suggested that those changing results may be linked to the switch from black-and-white film and TV to color media. ( This one is bit funny and very hard to believe! )

• If you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language. Whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself. The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. Negative emotions are more common than positive ones. Studies have been done on many different animals, and they all show the same brain waves during dreaming sleep as humans.

• Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid movements of the eyes. During REM sleep the body is paralyzed by a mechanism in the brain in order to prevent the movements which occur in the dream from causing the physical body to move. However, it is possible for this mechanism to be triggered before, during, or after normal sleep while the brain awakens.

However why do we dream is still an unsolved question  🙂