Dreams can be terrifying, exciting, fascinating or just plain weird. However, there are a lot of interesting facts about them, so if you want to learn more about this, then below you can take a closer look at the Top 10 psychological facts about dreams.
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10. Everybody Dreams
Regardless if you’re a man a woman or even a baby, we all dream. In fact, experts say that we usually have several dreams per night and each dream lasts anywhere between five to twenty minutes. In your entire life, you’ll spend 6 years of it dreaming!
9. You Forget Most of Your Dreams
95% of the dreams you have will be forgotten the minute you wake up. Why does this happen? Well, it’s because the changes in your brain occurring while you sleep are not compatible with the storage and information processing required for memory formation to take place.
8. Not Every Dream Is in Color
Most of us dream in color, but there is also a small percentage of individuals who actually dream in black and white.
7. Men and Women Don’t Dream the Same Way
Men and women dream about different things and most of the time, while men dream about aggressive things or situations, women will dream less about them. On top of that, women have longer dreams compared to those of men and their dreams feature more characters.
6. Animals May Dream
It’s happened to all of us to watch our beloved pets, such as our dog or our cat to wag their legs or tail while sleeping. According to specialists, there is a high possibility that your pet is dreaming and just like humans, animals go through sleep stages that include NREM and REM sleep. In an experiment, one monkey was taught sign language as a means of communication and later on, she signed certain pictures that probably indicated the experience of dreaming.
5. You Can Control Your Dreams
Few of us can do it, but it’s quite possible for you to control your dreams. Lucid dreaming is when you’re aware of the fact that you’re dreaming and you can influence everything that’s happening in your dream. While some people rarely have such dreams, for others it’s something that occurs quite often.
4. Negative Emotions Have a Higher Frequency in Dreams
According to Calvin S. Hall, who collected more than fifty thousand dream accounts from college students, he discovered that one may experience different emotions while dreaming. However, the most common one people experience is anxiety. On top of that, there was a predominance of negative emotions compared to positive emotions.
3. Blind People Dream
People who have lost their eyesight before turning 5, don’t really have visual dreams when they become adults. However, the truth is that they can still dream and their dreams are as vivid and as complex as the dreams of regular people. Instead of dreaming images though, blind people dream about things that include info from other senses such as smell, hearing, taste, touch, and sound.
2. When You Dream You’re Paralyzed
During REM sleep, your voluntary muscles are paralyzed, so this means that you cannot actually move at all. Why does this happen? Well, the phenomenon is known as REM atonia which protects you from acting out your dreams when sleeping. This means that your body will not move because motor neurons are not stimulated.
There are also cases when you can remain paralyzed even when you wake up and you can remain in that state for as long as 10 minutes. If this happens to you, then you should know that the phenomenon is called “sleep paralysis”. Specialists say though that this is quite normal and that even though it may be quite frightening for some people, it shouldn’t be a reason for concern. In just a few minutes, they’ll be able to regain muscle control.
1. A Lot of Dreams Are Universal
Even though most of the time what you dream is influenced a lot by your personal experiences, experts have discovered that there are certain dreams which everyone will eventually have. For instance, many people worldwide dream about falling, being attacked, or being chased. There are also other common dream experiences that include being naked in public, flying, arriving late, being frozen and unable to move, school events, and so forth.
Now that you know the Top 10 psychological facts about dreams, you are aware of the fact that certain dreams you may have are not unique and that while sleep paralysis is a bit frightening, you shouldn’t worry too much about it. Happy dreaming!