10 Amazing Facts about Dreams

Dreams are the stories the brain tells during sleep—collections of clips, images, feelings, and memories that involuntarily occur during the REM (rapid eye movement) Sleep. Whether you remember it or not, you dream every night. Sometimes they’re happy, other times sad, often bizarre.

Here are some interesting facts about dreams:

1.We only dream of what we already know - Wonder how we see the unknown faces in dreams? The fact is that we see only the people whom we have already seen in our lives. We would have seen hundreds and thousands of faces throughout our lives and so there is an endless supply of faces for our brain to utilize during our dreams.

2.We forget 90% of our dreams - We forget half of the dreams within 5 minutes of waking and 90% of it within 10 minutes. It is also said that pregnant women remember dreams more than others, largely due to the extreme hormonal changes during pregnancy. It is most likely that we can recall the dream, if we wake up at the end of the REM (Rapid eye movement) sleep.

3.Everybody dreams, even blind people - Every human being dream. If you think you are not getting dreams; that means you are forgetting your dreams. The average person has about 1,460 dreams per year, that's about four per night. On an average one can dream anywhere from one to two hours every night. People blind after birth can see images in dreams but people born blind do not see images. But they also have vivid dreams involving senses of sound, smell, touch and emotions.

4.Not everyone dreams in colour - Studies show that earlier 12% of people dream exclusively in black and white and the remaining in full colour. These days only 4.4% of the dreams of under-25 year olds are in black and white and the rest all dream in colour. Researchers say that, this change could be due to the change over from the black and white film and Television to colour media.

5.Emotions - Negative emotions are more common than positive emotions in dreams. The most common emotion one experiences while dreaming is anxiety.

6.Dreams are not what they are - Dreams speak in deeply symbolic language. The unconscious mind tries to compare your dream to something else, which is similar. So whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself.

7.Recurring dreams - Many people experience recurring dreams, while the content of most dreams is dreamt only once. That is, the same dream narrative is experienced over different occasions of sleep. Research shows that 65% of men and 70% of women report of recurrent dreams.

8.Men and women dream differently - About 70% of the characters in a man's dream are other men and on the other hand, women's dream equally of men and women. Men generally have more aggressive emotions in their dreams than females.

9.What gets incorporated in dreams - Most of us have had a dream like this where a sound from reality is heard in our dream and incorporated in some way. For example, when your brother is playing a guitar in his room, you incorporate this in your dream and dream of being in a musical concert.

10.Body is paralyzed - We dream during the REM stage of sleep. During REM 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.