Dreams! Did You Know...

Back in July, when I was in the middle of TFA "training" hell, I wrote about the freaky nightmares and dreams that I was having - mostly likely due to stress. Throughout the autumn and early winter, the nightmares had all but dissipated until this week. Now I'm back to having some crazy dreams. I'm not entirely sure what caused the return -- I mean other than the stress of midterms coming up, and being a first year teacher, and feeling like I'm over my head and wishing I had some actual teacher training... But, you know, beside all that, I can't imagine why I would be having nightmares again.  :-)

While I was doing some research on dreams, I found some really fascinating facts about dreams that I was unaware of and thought I'd share.  Did you know:

1. You Forget 90% of Your Dreams: within 5 minutes of waking half of your dream is forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone.
2. Blind People Also Dream: 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.
3. Everybody Dreams: Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder). If you think you are not dreaming – you just forget your dreams.
4. In Our Dreams We Only See Faces That We Already Know: 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.
5. Not Everybody Dreams in Color: 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.
6. Dreams are Symbolic: 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.
7. Emotions: The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. Negative emotions are more common than positive ones.
8. You Can Have 4 to 7 Dreams in One Night: On average you can dream anywhere from one or two hours every night.
9. You Spend Roughly Around 6 Years of Your Lifetime Dreaming:  Do the math: if you dream one to two hours every night, that averages out to 6 years of your life dreaming.
10. Body Paralysis: Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid movements of the eyes. REM sleep in adult humans typically occupies 20-25% of total sleep, about 90-120 minutes of a night’s sleep. 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.
11. Dream Incorporation: Our mind interprets the external stimuli that our senses are bombarded with when we are asleep and make them a part of our dreams. This means that sometimes in our dreams we hear a sound from reality and incorporate it in a way. For example you may be dreaming that you are in a concert while your brother is playing a guitar during your sleep.
12. Men and Women Dream Differently: Men tend to dream more about other men. Around 70% of the characters in a man’s dream are other men. On the other hand, a woman’s dream contains almost an equal number of men and women. Aside from that, men generally have more aggressive emotions in their dreams than the female lot.
13. Precognitive Dreams: Results of several surveys across large population sets indicate that between 18% and 38% of people have experienced at least one precognitive dream and 70% have experienced déjà  vu. The percentage of persons that believe precognitive dreaming is possible is even higher – ranging from 63% to 98%. (Precognition, also called future sight, refers to perception that involves the acquisition of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information.)
14. Animals Dream Too: Studies have been done on many different animals, and they all show the same brain waves during dreaming sleep as humans. Watch a dog sleeping sometime. The paws move like they are running and they make yipping sounds as if they are chasing something in a dream. (On average, dogs sleep around 10 to 13 hours a day, cats sleep 10 to 15 hours a day, koalas sleep 22 hours per day, and giraffes only sleep for 30 minutes a day. Oh, and bullfrogs never sleep.)
15. Ancient Artifact: The Beatty Papyrus is the oldest dream dictionary in existence. It was written around 1350 B.C. and discovered near Thebes.

Very interesting, yet strange facts about dreams. Tonight, I'll check those facts when I'm curled up snug in my bed. Nighty night.  Don't let the bed bugs bite!

Now here's one of my favorite "dream" songs: