Dreams are fascinating, fanciful, and sometimes downright frightening. Every year scientific groups and national organizations conduct studies and experiments examining human dreams. The study of dreams is known as oneirology. Progress is being made in this area of work, but as a population we know very little about the content and purpose of our dreams. One thing is for sure, the images, thoughts, and emotions that pass through our bodies during sleep can greatly influence our outlook on life. Here are 10 things you might not have known about dreams.
10. Blind People Dream
People who become 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. It is hard for a seeing person to imagine, but the body’s need for sleep is so strong that it is able to handle virtually all physical situations to make it happen.
9. You Forget 90% of your Dreams
Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream if forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone. The famous poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, woke one morning having had a fantastic dream (likely opium induced) – he put pen to paper and began to describe his “vision in a dream” in what has become one of English’s most famous poems: Kubla Khan. Part way through (54 lines in fact) he was interrupted. Coleridge returned to his poem but could not remember the rest of his dream. The poem was never completed.
Curiously, Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the story of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde whilst he was dreaming. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was also the brainchild of a dream.
8. Everybody Dreams
Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder). And it’s not only humans. All mammals have been shown to exhibit REM sleep, which is associated with dreams. Many birds also show signs of REM sleep, but reptiles and other cold-blooded animals do not.
7. Dreams Prevent Psychosis
In a recent sleep study, students who were awakened at the beginning of each dream, but still allowed their 8 hours of sleep, all experienced difficulty in concentration, irritability, hallucinations, and signs of psychosis after only 3 days. When finally allowed their REM sleep the student’s brains made up for lost time by greatly increasing the percentage of sleep spent in the REM stage.
6. We Only Dream of What We Know
Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts, but your mind is not inventing those faces, they are real faces of real people that you have seen during your life but may not know or remember. The evil killer in your latest dream may be a waiter from a restaurant you went to when you were just a little kid. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces through our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams.
5. Not Everyone Dreams in Color
A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. People also tend to have common themes in dreams, which are situations relating to school, being chased, running slowly/in place, sexual experiences, falling, arriving too late, a person now alive being dead, teeth falling out, flying, failing an examination, or a car accident. It is unknown whether the impact of a dream relating to violence or death is more emotionally charged for a person who dreams in color than one who dreams in black and white.
4. Dreams Help You Learn
REM sleep begins when signals are broadcasted from the base of the brain, an area called the pons. The pons distributes signals to the thalamus, which directs them towards the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is the area of the brain responsible for learning, thinking, and organizing information. The pons also sends signals that shut off the neurons in the spinal cord, causing temporary paralysis during REM sleep. REM sleep activates the area of the brain that we use for learning. This may be an extremely important factor in normal brain development during infancy. It may explain why small children spend much more time in REM sleep then adults. In addition, REM sleep is associated with increased protein in the brain. Studies have been conducted that correlate REM sleep and learning mental skills. Separate groups of people were taught the same skill and a larger percentage of individuals who fell into REM sleep during the night were able to recall the skill the next day. This theory is called the Ontogenetic Hypothesis of REM sleep.
3. Quitters Have More Vivid Dreams
People who have smoked cigarettes for a long time who stop, have reported much more vivid dreams than they would normally experience. Additionally, according to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology: “Among 293 smokers abstinent for between 1 and 4 weeks, 33% reported having at least 1 dream about smoking. In most dreams, subjects caught themselves smoking and felt strong negative emotions, such as panic and guilt. Dreams about smoking were the result of tobacco withdrawal, as 97% of subjects did not have them while smoking, and their occurrence was significantly related to the duration of abstinence. They were rated as more vivid than the usual dreams and were as common as most major tobacco withdrawal symptoms.”
2. External Stimuli Invade our Dreams
This is called Dream Incorporation and it is the experience that most of us have had where a sound from reality is heard in our dream and incorporated in some way. A similar (though less external) example would be when you are physically thirsty and your mind incorporates that feeling in to your dream. The famous painting above (Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening) by Salvador Dali, depicts this concept.
1. You are Paralyzed While You Sleep
Believe it or not, your body is virtually paralyzed during your sleep – most likely to prevent your body from acting out aspects of your dreams. Glands begin to secrete a hormone that helps induce sleep and neurons send signals to the spinal cord which cause the body to relax and later become essentially paralyzed.
Bonus Facts! (Yay!)
1. When you are snoring, you are not dreaming.
2. Toddlers do not dream about themselves until around the age of 3. From the same age, children typically have many more nightmares than adults do until age 7 or 8.
3. If you are awakened out of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, you are more likely to remember your dream in a more vivid way than you would if you woke from a full night sleep.
