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. According to the Wikipedia article
on dreaming, “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.”
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. My own
experience of this includes repeatedly drinking
a large glass of water in the dream which
satisfies me, only to find the thirst returning
shortly after – this thirst… drink… thirst… loop
often recurs until I wake up and have a real
drink.
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.”
4. Dreams are not about what they are
about
If you dream about some particular subject it is
not often that the dream is about that. Dreams
speak in a deeply symbolic language. The
unconscious mind tries to compare your dream
to something else, which is similar. Its like
writing a poem and saying that a group of ants
were like machines that never stop. But you
would never compare something to itself, for
example: “That beautiful sunset was like a
beautiful sunset”. So whatever symbol your
dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a
symbol for itself.
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, s*xual 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.
6. We Only Dream of What We Know
Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who
play out certain parts – did you know that 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 the guy who pumped petrol in to your
Dad’s car 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.
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.
8. Everybody Dreams
Every human being dreams (except in cases of
extreme psychological disorder) but men and
women have different dreams and different
physical reactions. Men tend to dream more
about other men, while women tend to dream
equally about men and women. In addition,
both men and women experience sexually
related physical reactions to their
dreams regardless of whether the dream is
s*xual in nature; males experience erections
and females experience increased vaginal blood
flow.
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 by a “Person from
Porlock“. Coleridge returned to his poem but
could not remember the rest of his dream. The
poem was never completed.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
[...]
Curiously, Robert Louis Stevenson came up
with the story of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde
whilst he was dreaming. Wikipedia has more on
that here. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was also
the brainchild of a dream.
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.
