Undoubtedly, no healthy person in the world is able to do without sleep. But how much do we know about him? It turns out that there are many interesting things related to sleep and dreams, known, as a rule, only to specialists. Most people simply do not suspect about them or are mistaken about it. Here are some of them…
Dreams of all healthy people
Some people claim that they never dream, or when asked what they dreamed, they answer that they never dreamed of anything … In fact, almost everyone sees dreams, just not everyone remembers them. The complete absence of dreams indicates a mental illness and cannot be considered the norm.
A small percentage of people only dream in black and white
Until the mid-60s of the last century, this figure was about 12 percent. Now the proportion of those who dream exclusively in monochrome is only 4.4 percent of the total sample. Researchers attribute this to the spread of color television broadcasting.
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We "watch" from four to seven dreams in a night
"Viewing" can take from half an hour to two hours. But we rarely remember everything that we dreamed, and time in a dream can flow in a completely different way - faster or slower than in real life.
We only remember 10 percent of our dreams
If right after waking up we can still remember what we dreamed, then after ten minutes 90 percent of the content of the dream is usually forgotten. We remember a dream entirely only if it was interrupted by something and we did not watch it to the end.
Snoring and dreaming are incompatible
People only snore when they are in the slow phase of sleep, in which dreams cannot be seen. Therefore, if a person snores, he currently does not dream of anything …
Men and women have different dreams
So, representatives of the stronger sex often dream that they are communicating, fighting with someone or fighting. However, they are more likely to dream of other men than women. And the fair sex dreams about the same number of women and men. Also, men in a dream usually behave more aggressively than women.
Blind people have dreams too
Paradoxical, but true. Those who are blind from birth, however, do not see visual images: they only dream of sounds, smells and sensations.
Animals dream too
This is shown both by observation of animals and scanning of their brain impulses. In highly developed creatures, dream schemes practically do not differ from human ones, except that the content is probably more adapted to animal thinking.
All the people we dream about are real
Sometimes we see images of strangers in our dreams. In fact, we have seen all these people somewhere before, but at a conscious level we did not remember them. But their appearance was deposited in our subconscious to emerge later in a dream. The subconscious mind, alas, is not capable of spontaneously generating other people's faces.
We often experience negative emotions in our sleep
It can be fear, longing, or despair. We may, for example, dream that some danger threatens us or that something bad is happening in our life. But we rarely experience joy in a dream.
Dreams are often symbolic
Many are skeptical about the teachings of Freud, which interprets any images from dreams as manifestations of our "unconscious". In fact, most dreams should not be interpreted literally, and one object in a dream can really be a symbol of a completely different object, experts say. Moreover, some symbols can be interpreted unambiguously, while others are signs that only we ourselves can interpret.
Prophetic dreams are reality
Although the existence of prophetic dreams is constantly controversial, you can't get away from statistics. Studies show that between 18 and 38 percent of people have had dreams that predict the future at least once, and 70 percent have experienced the "deja vu" effect, which is also associated with dreams. Between 63 and 90 percent of research participants worldwide said they believed in the possibility of prophetic dreams.
In a dream, we have temporary paralysis
A person is able to dream only in the so-called REM sleep phase (the so-called REM phase, which takes 20 to 25 percent of the total sleep time). So that we do not repeat in real life the physical movements that we perform in a dream, the subconscious mind during this period paralyzes our body. If this mechanism fails, then phenomena such as sleepwalking occur.
The surrounding reality becomes part of our dream
External stimuli that affect us while we sleep are woven into the fabric of sleep, but interpreted in a distorted manner. So, if we are cold, we may dream that we are at the North Pole. If the radio is playing in the apartment, in a dream we see ourselves at a music concert, and so on.
In a dream, you can experience sexual arousal and orgasm
It depends on the plot of the dream. And some still manage to have real sex with their partner without waking up. But this is already a variant of sleepwalking.