Interesting Facts About Dreams

What are dreams? As a little girl, I used to think that my mind was playing a movie every time I fell asleep. In actuality, when we fall asleep, our bodies encounter a series of physical changes, the heart rate also increases a bit, we tend to breathe faster and our brainwaves adapt to different states of awareness.

Smaller muscles around our mouth, fingers and eyes may twitch while sleeping, larger muscles can't move as freely as they would while awake. Thus, we can't act out our dreams. Dreaming is an experience, which occurs while we sleep and often includes pictures, voices or sounds, thoughts, and other kinds of sensations.

As we all know that dreams are beyond our control and seem unrealistic many times, some people are conscious about their dreams and can alter different panoramas of it as well. These aspects make dreams so interesting, captivating and bewitching. The following article provides you with many more interesting facts about dreams.

Approximately 12% of people dream only in black-and-white and the rest can dream in full color. That's a fascinating fact. And, this can be linked to technology and invention of color media/television. So is there something called dream colors meaning? I'm pretty sure, there is.

Hasn't it happened to you that as soon as you wake up, you can't seem to remember what you were dreaming about? This is true that within 5 minutes of us waking up from a dream, half the dream is already forgotten. And within 10 minutes, 90% of the dream is lost. This is why we have such a hard time remembering dreams.

People tend to experience anxiety the most in their dreams. Such negative emotions appear more in our dreams than positive ones.

On an average, a person can literally dream at least 1 or 2 hours each night.

What do dreams mean? If a dream is on a particular subject, it doesn't always mean that the dream is about that subject. There may be some deep symbolic meaning behind it and the symbol(s) picked up in your dreams can be hinting towards something else.

During REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, our bodies are paralyzed due to a mechanism in the brain. This prevents the physical body movements that occur in our dreams. This mechanism can be triggered before, during or even after normal sleep, while the brain wakes up.

Although the contents of most dreams occur once, many people have experienced recurring dreams. The narrative of the dream is same, but only at different occasions of sleeping.

People who've lost their eye-sight after birth can see some images while asleep. Now those who are blind since birth don't see any images, however, they experience vivid dreams that involve their sense of smell, touch, emotions and sound. All physical situations help make dreams, which in short provides blind people ability to dream.

Each and every human being is capable of having dreams, except for those who suffer extreme psychological disorder. And if you think that you're not dreaming, you have just forgotten about it.

Do dogs dream? How about cats? Any other animals? Studies have proven that many different animals show similar brain waves during "dream sleep" as we do. If you have a dog or cat, watch when he/she is sleeping. Any kind of paw movement(s) that indicate that they are running (while making a yapping sound) will mean that they are chasing someone/something.

There may be strange faces and/or places in our dreams, but your mind is not making any of this up. You may not remember the places and faces during your life, but your mind does. And hence, when you feel you don't know someone, in fact, you have seen him/her sometime in your life.

Also called "dream incorporation", our mind starts to interpret the external stimuli that storm our senses while we sleep and they become a part of our dreams. For example, we hear a sound in reality and then incorporate it in our dreams in some way or another.

People all across the world have had at least 1 precognitive dream and many have experienced déjà vu. "Precognition" usually refers to an individual's perception which involves the acquisition of the future information.

Certain studies indicate that if a person is sleeping and snores, he/she can't dream.

You can actually experience the pleasures of having sex in your dreams, but also have an orgasm (sometimes as strong as the real one). The sensations which you feel while lucid dreaming can be as pleasurable and strong as you would in reality.

An average person has approximately 1,460 dreams in a year, which adds up to 4 dreams per night.

The Egyptian pharaohs were regarded as the children of Ra, the Egyptian Sun God, and hence, their dreams were looked upon as divine.

The people of Fu-Kein, in the Chinese province, would call on their ancestors for dream revelation by sleeping on the graves.

The people of a West African group known as The Ashanti take dreams and their meanings so seriously, that they would let a husband take legal action against another man if he has had an erotic dream about his wife.

Appearance of vampires in dreams represent a person's general fears and anxieties. Or it can represent anxieties about that person's sexuality.

Dreaming about flying has been around since ancient times and that too before man invented airplanes.

In Northern Mexico, the Raramuri people deliberately make their sleeping positions in such a way that they can wake up in the middle of the night and discuss their dreams with each other.

Studies have shown that children tend to have more dreams about animals than adults. Lions, bears, snakes, dogs, cats, horses and some mythical creatures/monsters were the most frequent animal figures in those dreams.

Men dream about men, more often than women dream about men. For some odd reasons this sexual asymmetry is almost universal and is similar with children, adolescents and adults.

People who have watched black-and-white television when they were young tend to experience more monochrome (black-and-white) dreams, as compared to those who watch color television.

Dreams are mystical and wonderful. Many people have tried to find reasons and meanings behind them. There are hundreds of research conducted and the latest information we receive is just fascinating. When I read and understood about them, I believed (even more than before) that dreams can be so fascinating, intriguing, and mystifying, in their own unexplainable/unimaginable ways.