This afternoon I had a (very rare) nap. During that nap I had a lucid dream (most of which I no longer remember). As I was waking up, I was thinking about my dream and thought that it would be a great idea to write a list about dreams for the site. So, here are the top 10 amazing facts about dreams.
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.
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.
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 sexual in nature; males experience erections and females experience increased vaginal blood flow.
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. [Source]
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.
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, sexual 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. [Source]
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.
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.” [Source]
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. The famous painting above (Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening) by Salvador Dali, depicts this concept.
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.”
Bonus: Extra Facts
1. When you are snoring, you are not dreaming.
2. Toddlers do not dream about themselves until around the age of 3. From the same age, children typically have many more nightmares than adults do until age 7 or 8.
3. If you are awakened out of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, you are more likely to remember your dream in a more vivid way than you would if you woke from a full night sleep.
External Stimuli – I often have dreams wherein this annoying klaxon is sounding, and won't go away. No matter what's going on in the dream, there's no way to turn it off.
When I do wake, it is to the sound of the alarm clock, the klaxon of my dream.
try taking away the alarm clock.
STFU d!ck @$$ hole.
I just ccklied that link and looked at your upcoming schedule ….Vegas RnR … DO IT!!!! All the cool kids, and by that I mean myself, will be there!Fruit Fly recently posted..
regarding point 1 and 2. a lot of people who claim to be abducted by aliens (with all the probing and what-have-you) when they go through sleep *****ysis it turns out they have this condition that allows your eyes to be open during sleep, especially during REM sleep and while dreaming. I forgot the name of the condition, but because the body is immobile, and they are dreaming of being abducted by aliens or some such thing, it seems extraordinarily real to them. Because they are literally seeing their dream.
I believe it’s called “Sleep Paralysis
yes it is called sleep paralysis… I have this all the time every since i was little…its the scariest thing to ever have to deal with on a nightly basis!
Martin L: congrats on 3 years! I am a full time smoker and I have just decided never to quit – I enjoy it too much and it gives me a good reason to fight the anti-smokers
thats horrible! you know 125,000 people die of smoking annually
you sound like my gramma
alice is a fag.
My dreams tend to include supernatural or mythical beings – such as giants, living skeletons, and zombies. I guess this would be a common theme like those mentioned in #5. My dreams also tend to be quite violent. This used to freak me out, but I'm used to it by now.
I hope nobody thinks i'm too insane now. I'm only slightly crazy – i just have messed up dreams.
you got a very good wsebite, Sword lily I detected it through yahoo.VA:F [1.9.10_1130]please wait…Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)VA:F [1.9.10_1130]Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)
Any references for #4? I think dream interpretation got a bad rep with Freud since his theories seemed to be based on complete guesswork (as were most of his theories IMO). I'd be interested to know what modern psychology has to say about this.
With regards to #1, I once woke up while my body was still paralized. I couldn't move a muscle for about a minute…freaked me out!
No matter how Freud arrived at his *****ual interpretations, they were mostly correct. Unlike Freud I have followed up my dreams and those of many others. I found that dreams predict our ***** life. And this is where Freud failed miserably. He did not investigate this question but simply denied that it was possible to dream the future. In fact we never dream anything else but the future. Yes, we do see things of the past, but they are like words you have learnt in the past. In other words when the dream brings up a past event it means that somehing like it WILLL occur in the future. In this way the dream saves time and space. If you want to know more ready my book DREAMS, Pregrams of Tomorrow. I shall send you one for the price of the postage
I’d be interested in one of your books, E-mail me.
Mickey,
i love dreams and i love to dream
Cat Skyfire: I have the same thing happen with my alarm too – and as a kid when my mother would call me to get out of bed.
mix2323: I agree – it is especially cool when you can control your dreams.
michael: wow – that is amazing – I haven’t heard of that – I don’t think I would like it very much.
I can attest to Fact #3: I’m coming up on three years smoke-free (after 33 years as a slave to the noxious weed), and particularly over the past year, my dreams have been like successful collaborations by Lynch, Kubrick AND Spielberg. Very intense and vivid, full of interwoven plots in cities full of strange architecture where I know my way around perfectly. From my present standpoint, given the choice between tobacco and cool dreams, I’ll take the dreams, no contest.
Michael its called sleep paralysis, I used to have it. The first couple times it was extremely freaky. You’re eyes are open and you’re somewhat aware that you’re awake but your dreams still continue in kind of a muted way. It’s like you’re awake and your dreams are taking place in your room and you’re still paralyzed and unable to move. Scary stuff, you get a distorted tunnel vision and hearing was weird/altered. Strange lights, images, sounds stuff like that, and again you try to move and can’t. You’re correct most doctors attribute UFO abductions and such as episodes of sleep paralysis.
someone told me that you were paralyzed when you sleep, but i didnt believe them until now, but that makes me wonder how do people sleep walk if they are paprlyzed?
during REM sleep the body becomes paralyzed that is thy you may feel like you are falling, sleep walking occurs in stage 4 of sleep when your body is not paralyzed anymore
its all to do with the electronic pulse's that get sent up and down your spinal cord from your brain. When your asleep,the electronic pulse's from the brain are cut off,but in some cases,the pulse's haven't been cut off,or manage to overcome the chemical which stops them…which means your brain is still sending messages around your body. This then leads to you not being paralyzed,talk about stating the obvious :L. well any ways,when you dream,its the only thing your brain focuses on,and because the brain can still send messages around your body,it causes your muscles to react and this is what causes sleep walking.
I love having lucid dreams, its like daydreaming, but more a lot more realistic and fun. I can remember those dreams for ages after I wake up. Theres one I had years ago I can still remember.
Someone should do a list of ’10 facts about lucid dreaming’ or something like that.
smac: that is interesting – I almost never dream of supernatural beings – in fact, I can’t remember a single dream in which I did.
kirstin: I would presume that they are not in the REM state when sleep walking – there are four stages of sleep – paralysis may not occur in all four stages.
You are only paralyzed during REM sleep, during stages 1-4 muscles are still active. It is more true to say that you are paralyzed when you ‘dream’ because most dreaming is done in REM sleep. Some dreaming is done in the earlier stages however so even this is not completely true.
dswissmiss: I am not sure what modern psychology says, but I think that a lot of reputable people do consider that some of the symbols may be interpreted but probably only by the person dreaming – the method of which is not to interpret the dream itself, but the feelings elicited by the dream. I have also woken up while paralysed – it is an incredibly awful feeling – I think it is related to the feeling you sometimes get of needing to drag yourself out of a sleep.
Shane: ah – thanks for clarifying that
I remember taking a nap in college and “waking up” still paralyzed. I could not tell if I was still dreaming, but dreaming about being stuck on a couch and not being able to move, or if i was actually awake enough to detect my surroundings, but was still paralyzed from dreaming. Either way, it scared the crap out of me! All I wanted to do was get up, but I couldn’t!
That has happened to me several times. Sometimes i can force this to happen. You are awake enough to detect your surroundings but can't move. I sometimes go straight back to sleep. My family tried waking me up but even my uncontrollable grin didn't activate at that time. They kicked my back and I fell off my bed onto the hardwood flooring. I got a bloody nose and they were suprised and panicky because the pain was supposed to wake me up. I yelled at my brother when I truly woke up. I told my grandmother about this she never heard about it before.
umm this has nothin to do with ur comment but i just wanted to say more than half my dreams come true in exact detail so im scared and want help
A lot of times in my dreams, I slowly realize that I am dreaming because of some small detail that is different, and upon seeing this detail, I notice more and more things that aren’t right and that are pretty bizarre, and then my dream usually ends
I love dreams. I used to remember them so well. I have recently been able to recall dreams more and more and keep a dream diary. Dreams are fun to decypher. You never know what you will get but most of the time when you figure it out you will know exactly what part of your life it is aimed at. I also tend to have “series” dreams where it’ll have a to be continued ending and then a few days or weeks later I will have the follow up dream. Like I have said before in another list, I tend to have prophetic dreams. Oh the dreams we dream….
#3 contradicts #4. #4 is total BS anyway. Dreams are simply a side effect of the purging process the subconscious mind goes through. Making any sense of them whatsoever is your conscious mind trying to sort them out.
#10 is absurd as a fact. Yes, it’s true, of course. But why would lacking a certain sense mean you can’t dream? Not to mention that we dream with all our senses.
#7 Nope. A researcher recently spent an extended time without sleep, or any negative effects other than tiredness. He also avoided stimulants. It’s possible that the negative effects associated with sleep deprivation are due more to the method used to stay awake.
#6 isn’t the whole story. If it were true, human imagination wouldn’t exist. We create faces and such BASED on what we know, but we do a lot of mix and match.
#5 also is not the whole story. People who claim to dream exclusively in black and white only remember the dreams that were influenced by old television shows. They have many more dreams that are in color, they just don’t remember them. Much like people who claim not to dream at all.
Bonus: Yes, you can snore and dream at the same time.
As for sleep paralysis, I used to be able to relax myself just before sleeping, to the point where I’d slip into sleep paralysis. It’s like this switch, where all of a sudden you’re in complete fear. You also sense a presence nearby, something ominous and evil. You also hear a weird light buzzing sound, and your vision is kind of… I don’t know, it’s like the contrast is turned way up. Pretty freaky stuff. I can’t do it anymore, mainly because after having a kid, I just want to sleep.
TerranRich: i have the same problem when i sleep on my back i hate it
As a clinical psychology graduate, I can affirm what Joel said about #4. Dreams have no hidden meanings. The brain is simply firing off neurons in a seemingly random way in an attempt to form memories and give the conscious mind a rest, which is an organ just like any other that requires energy and rest to function properly. The concept of dream *****ysis did not even really exist in any form other than anecdotally before Freud, and most of the legitimate, modern psychological community now agrees that Freud’s theories were total bunk. Freud is hailed as the father of modern psychology not for the theories themselves, but for the method and thought processes he used to formulate conjectures.
I dream of Jeannie. I mean, some hot chick with a big rack that pops out of a jar and calls me master. She can get me things I really need, like an iPhone or some nachos, then pops back into the jar when Sportscenter comes on.
Err, what were we talking about?
#3, quitters, happened to me, just like the article says, 4 weeks after quitting I had a dream where I was smoking and wow did I feel guilty. #5 I think is kind of ridiculous, dreams are your imagination, if you dream you are wearing red pants you wake up remembering that, at that point try and remember what colour shirt you were wearing. If you are not focusing on it in a dream then it has no relavence and therefor not imagined or remembered.
Awesome Post! Definitely added a few wrinkles on my brain with this one.
I can definitely relate to #1. I have actually had a few nightmares where I am only partially aware that I am sleeping, however, when trying to wake myself up I realize that my arms, legs & torso are virtually immovable and do not respond to my mental thoughts. Thie 1st time it happend I was really scared and it brought my nightmare to a whole other level. But after I’ve experienced it a couple times I realize I just have to wait a few moments for my body and mind to catch up to one another…haha
This isn’t fair… my dreams almost never make any sense. They are completely random, so much that i can’t even explain most of them. How can they prove 6 btw…
also my psych teacher in high school told us that when one dreams of the open ocean, it alludes to *****ual fantasies for his or her mother?!?!
Jfrater: You said something about controlling your dreams. I think thats a little bit scary. That means that you are sleeping, but you are aware of what happens in your mind, so you are inside your own mind. What if then you can’t find a way out??? Maybe you can confuse the reality with your dream, and you think that your mind is the real world, and then you never wake up again….
SCAAAAAAAAARYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!
Charly: heh maybe I am The One?
not to be a dissenter, but how can we know “facts” about dreams? we can speculate, sure. but facts…?
DiscHuker: You are right – but it sounds better than “Top 10 currently accepted but occasionally disputed psychological opinions on dreams”
I agree somewhat with DiscHuker, we can’t really know facts about dreams. Which means that the clinical psychologists with their fancy degrees really don’t know any more than anyone else. Its all speculation. More and more we find chemical responses that cause things like sleep paralysis, but what is really REALLY happening in the brain may always be a mystery.
Joel: If black and white dreams are based on television shows, does that mean that no one ever dreamed in black and white before television? Also, staying awake is not the same thing as being woken up constantly throughout the night. In addition, “one researcher” does not qualify as a theory buster.
TravelerDante: Dreams can definitely have a “hidden meaning” if the unconscious is pondering something that the conscious mind isn’t willing to understand. I agree that Freud’s one size fits all approach to dream interpretation has been basically disregarded, but that doesn’t mean that dreams are merely neurons firing off at random intervals.
My dreams are extremely linear and very often deal with something in my daily life that is troubling me. Of course, I sleep very poorly because my mind is almost never at rest. Every therapist I have ever seen has been amazed at how explicit my dreams are, how much I remember, and how much the are affected by my life.
Another note, that paralysis hormone is what is attributed to causing the sensation of having something or someone sitting on one’s chest upon waking, an experience that is traditionally blamed on Incubus (the demon, not the band).
How could item #6 be proven? I’d be fascinated to know…
(Seems to be you’d have to prove that nobody has ever invented a face in a dream. How do you prove billions of negatives?)
I talk in my sleep alot. I used to date this girl who would try to ask me questions when I did this to see if I was running around on her. I would inevitably wake up at some point in mid sentence with her looming over me hanging on my every word. She’d always be so ashamed at getting caught she would never tell me what I said.
Crazy far out girl was that one.
Another example of how external stimuli invade our dreams, when your alarm goes off and it is incorporated into your dream as maybe a fire alarm or security alarm. So many time has this happened to me that I’ve switched my alarm to the radio (which is like having the radio talk host suggest to me what to dream about haha).
By the way, I love Dali.
i often fall asleep with the tv on, so when i awak im usually dreaming about something related to whats on the tv. ie ill wake up while having a dream about being in WW2 and look at the tv and itll be saving private ryan or something on.
lately because of tivo, ive been waking up to a lame espn workout show lol.
I have a lot of recurring dreams that I’ve had since I was a little kid, and they are the dreams I remember most…I still remember the original ones from when I was a kid.
And a few instances of outside stimuli…I often have dreams about trying to find a bathroom and I can’t find one or when I do find one, it’s usually a huge room with tons of tiny, unaccessible stalls or there’s no privacy and then, I wake up having to go real bad. There was also one time that in my dream I was being continually stung by a hornet in the palm of my hand and I couldn’t shake it off. When I woke up, my hand was pounding…I don’t know what was actually happening. And if I sleep in some way that my arms fall asleep (usually up across my head, or one might be under my side), in my dream, I have no arms…and that’s usually not what the dream is about, I just happen to not have any arms.
aplsud: Tarot cards and horoscopes have hidden meanings too if you look hard enough for them and believe in that sort of thing. Just because you think your dreams are your unconscious mind pondering what your conscious mind isn’t willing to understand doesn’t mean it is. The best scientific evidence we have to date is murky on the subject, as dreams are highly individualized, often sharing common themes that we as humans in general have hard-wired into our brains but expressing those themes in entirely idiosyncratic ways; ergo, it is honestly impossible to objectively determine the answer to this question, so the answer comes to this: do you believe that your dreams have hidden meanings? Then they do. Good luck figuring them out. I for one don’t tend to believe in that kind of stuff. Our brains are organic computers, and IMO dreams are nothing more than the short-term memory banks cleansing themselves.
TravelerDante: “The concept of dream *****ysis did not even really exist in any form other than anecdotally before Freud, and most of the legitimate, modern psychological community now agrees that Freud’s theories were total bunk.”
That’s not true, many Native American cultures relied heavily on dream interpretation for many things.
Good list though. I dream frequently about being chased, and a new theme has been emerging involving my younger brother protecting or helping me. I have also dreamed about supernatural creatures, such as tiny mutant trees come to life, posessed multicolored cartoonish donkeys, and vampires. The vampire dream was really cool actually. =p I have never dreamed about riding that I can remember however, which is strange since it completely consumes my life.
I often have a LOT of trouble waking up to my alarm. This began over the summer and continues. I thought it was because I was used to it, so I used my cell phone, bought a new alarm clock, set two alarms, and so on. I frequently don’t remember my alarm going off the first time and wake up half an hour later afer hitting the snooze button several times. I should probably look up some information on this. It has caused me to miss class on more than one occasion, and I’m not sleep deprived.
Charly- I can also control my dreams. Just last night I changed a dream. My son was about to be killed, and I changed it. I don’t know how Ido it, but I do it often.
Traveler, my mother in law is a practicing neural psychologist, and she believes that dreams are a way for our unconscious to help us discover things about ourselves that we would otherwise ignore. For instance, I’ve had a reccuring dream for years about being trapped in a trunk underwater. There are fish and mermaids swimming all around me, some happy, some sad, some angry, and etc. After using me as a guinea pig for a psychological battery, she found that I have an emotional block. I prevent myself from experiencing emotions, and instead I just take a deep breath, and push them down. So is it just a coincidence that I’ve had dreams for years about being trapped underwater with emotions surrounding me?
aplspud, television certainly wasn’t the first source of black and white images. But unless you had seen such imagery – like, say, early photographs – how would you know what anything would look like without color? It is not naturally occuring.
People forget a great deal of what they dream. We dream many times throughout our sleep, and in fact have several separate dreams in the space of what we remember as one continuous dream. We remember only the most recent and most significant parts. Dreaming in black and white would definitely stand out, as it is so unnatural.
And I wouldn’t be so eager to dismiss clinical psychologists. After all, we barely understand physics and yet you don’t dismiss physicists, do you?
The discovery of one researcher – and I wish I could find the study so you’d understand it was a respected scientist and not some kid on a WoW bender – IS enough to suggest that what we know about sleep isn’t necessarily correct.
I’m not sure why you brought up staying awake vs having sleep interrupted.
Charly, I’ve never had that problem. I have lucid dreams. The whole point is that you’re aware you’re dreaming. The moment you forget that, you lose control. People who lucid dream on purpose have little tricks to remind themselves that they are dreaming. The hard part is staying in the dream, as lucid dreaming occurs in a mental state very close to being awake.
Lucid dreaming is probably even less understood than more typical dreaming. If it’s more effort, why do we feel more refreshed upon waking?
Joel, When I have had lucid dreams I try hard to change something but things keep repeating until I let it happen and although I try to wake up I can't.
Enter your comment here.
I used to dream of a house with monsters serially when I was a child, also had dreams where I battled the devil (yet I am not christian now) yet I can see patterns from those dreams repeating in my life (im 32 now). I had one recurring dream around age 6 or 7 where everyone in the world had gone crazy and had been taken over by a huge eye in the sky. If you looked at it, you were possessed by the eye. Me and this huge monster were running from the crazy people, the monster made a mistake of looking up in the sky at the eye and started bowing up and down then it came after me. I always awakened after this. Anybody have anything similar?
.. is it a problem if i have lucid dreams without trying
Sorry for not getting these all in one really long post, but I’m addressing issues I get the email notice.
If you look at your dreams as expressing hidden thoughts, you’re looking at it backwards.
Sleep consists of several stages of consciousness. There’s the deepest stage, where no dreaming occurs. It’s complete downtime. It is impossible to wake directly from this state – your mind MUST go through higher stages to become awake.
There’s the next deepest stage, right below where dreaming occurs. Not much is going on here, but this is the place your mind rests between dream “snippets”.
The REM stage. This is where the subconscious mind is throwing out all the garbage, which generates all the stuff you remember as a dream. It is possible to wake up from here, and you won’t even remember what you were just dreaming because your mind wasn’t awake enough yet.
The semi-conscious stage. This is where your conscious mind looks at what your subconscious mind has been spewing and says “WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT MEAN?!?” Because your conscious mind is very literal, it tries to assign meaning to it. To the point where it will edit what you’ve been dreaming and try to suggest to the subconscious what it thinks it should see next. From here we can either wake up the rest of the way and remember the dream we just had, or go back down to the deeper stages.
The highest stage of sleep is actually full consciousness, though only aware internally, and we always pass through it on our way to waking up. Usually it’s so brief we don’t notice – one moment we’re dreaming, the next we’re awake – but it is possible to keep returning to this state before going back down for REM. That is lucid dreaming.
We bounce up and down through most of these stages repeatedly the entire time we’re asleep, even several times throughout a single dream. We stay in one stage or another for only a short time usually, but some stages we sort of hover in for a long time depending on where we are sleep-wise.
And we know all this because each of these stages coincides with brainwave activity, which we can measure. This explanation is a bit simplified, as there’s some more stages at the bottom end.
Arkz, only if for some weird reason you don’t want to have them. The rest of us wish we could have them without trying.
I feel like most dream interpretation theories rest on this idea that you have an unconscious part of the brain separate from the conscious. I really think this should be questioned as there is no evidence for the existence of a fully reasoning subconscious brain. Just because your head is filled with memories you are not currently focusing on, does not mean that these thoughts are being mulled through and incorporated into your world at a subconscious level, no?
It just seems to me like another Freudian theory that stuck with our culture even though modern psychology has left it long ago. Not to be too negative though, I still think we should have an open mind about this.
a lot of times when im dreaming and remember soudns from it i recognize them sometimes from commercials on tv from when i left it on when i slept. its weirddd
It’s weird…sometimes when I have a nightmare or a sad dream, I start to tell myself in my dream that it’s a dream and I need to wake up…then I do!
They say you can’t dream until you’ve reached the 15 minute REM phase, or something about there, but I have had vivid dreams with less than 9 minutes of sleep, my dear you haven’t touched on prophetic dreams, one that I am well familiar with.
I used to have dreams when I was younger that I was really busting to go toilet… finally I made it to the bathroom but all of a sudden everything was warm and I had wet the bed… Lucky that one doesn’t happen anymore
Also, I used to sleep listening to the radio, one night I had a dream that I was in a radio ad!!
My boyfriend and I will sometimes wake up at about 4 or 5am and speak to eachother for a bit / go toilet and then go back to sleep. We agreed that after going back to sleep for that last hour or so we always have very vivid dreams.
Such an interesting topic..
Joel: The study in #7 is about people being woken up repeatedly without the chance to dream. You were talking about someone just staying up. They are different. For instance, I know if I can only get 7 hours of sleep, I am going to be insanely irritable all day. But if I get 6 hours, or 8.5 or more hours, I’m fine. Probably because of where I’m being woken up in my sleep cycle. Likewise, if I just stay up all night, I’m usually ok the next day.
By scientific method, you’re partially correct that one dissenting study can mean the previous theory isn’t “necessarily correct” but it doesn’t mean the new study is correct either. And to have an experiment on only one subject without any control is usually discounted.
And I didn’t dismiss clinical psychologists. I was referring specifically to dream study. I’ve participated in many medical and psychological studies, as I am actually very scientific minded. But I think here are some things that are either beyond our understanding, or at least beyond what we can understand at this point in our evolution. I think its fascinating that we can measure brainwaves and make images of what is happening physically in the brain while dreams are occurring. But that doesn’t account for what makes up dreams, what the images are, where they come from.
TravelerDante: The difference between Tarot and astrology and dreams is that in the former, one is taking an outside, physical element and attempting to match it up to certain behaviors and events in a person’s life. Dreams on the other hand are coming solely from within. Why did my brain create that story, image, event? I think we are interpreting “hidden meaning” in different ways. I’m not implying that everything one dreams has to be a symbol for something else. But I do think dreams are a way for our brains to grapple with something we are either struggling with in our life, or are unwilling or unable to process consciously. Sometimes. Not always. If its simply a reset of the short term memory, why, for instance, would I as an adult have recurring dreams about my elementary school? What kind of purging is that? But as you said, we can all believe what we want to believe.
I have to take issue with calling these facts. I mean really can anyone know for sure?
#6 Only dream about what we know.. How was this verified? Have they *****yzed every person in the dream and determined, somehow, that well yes they had seen them before?? What about creative works produced?
#3 Quitters have more vivid dreams..
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Carl Jung said – People you dream about signify those characteristics in yourself that they symbolize.
Once in my pre-cal class, I had to go to the bathroom really bad but I fell asleep during the first five minutes of class and didn’t go. While I was asleep, though, I had a dream that I did ask to go and I was walking into the bathroom stall. I’m lucky that a really loud girl was sitting next to me and I woke up because i’m pretty sure I would have wet my pants.
Ok, I don’t remember who said what and I’m too lazy to look but anyways.
Whoever said you can’t dream in the deepest stage of sleep is wrong. The dreams in NREM sleep (Stages 1-4) “tend to be more like thoughts about daily occurences and far shorter than REM dreams.” (Foulkes & Schmidt, 1983; Takeuchi et al., 2003)
According to the Psychology book I have open in front of me, people do not necessarily have to go through the higher (or lighter) stages of sleep before awaking. Naturally, yes that happens, but you can awaken someone even if their in deep Non-REM Stage 4 sleep. The book does say they are more difficult to awaken, and upon awakening they are commonly disoriented and confused.
I don’t think anyone else has stated this (at least not clearly). The 4 stages of sleep and REM sleep comprise the sleep cycle, which is repeated 4 or 5 times throughout a single night’s sleep. A normal sleep cycle takes an average of an hour and a half, with Stage 4 sleep being longer in the beginning of the night and REM sleep being longer in the last part of the sleep period, just before awakening.
Awake
Stage 1 NREM sleep (Average 10 minutes)
Stage 2 NREM sleep (As long as 20 minutes)
Stage 3 NREM sleep (As long as 40 minutes, after the first stage 3 that is shorter than 40 minutes)
Stage 4 (As long as 30 to 40 minutes)
REM (A few minutes to an hour)
Now, going to the sleep deprivation argument going on right now. Here is what my textbook say has to say.
Sleep deprivation, or loss of sleep, is a serious problem, which many people have without realizing it. People stay up too late at night during the week, get up before they’ve really rested to go to work or school, and then try to pay off the “sleep debt” on the weekend. All of that disrupts the normal sleep-wake cycle and isn’t good for anyone’s health. Some typical symptoms of sleep deprivation include trembling hands, inattention, staring off into space, droopy eyelids, and general discomfort, as well as emotional symptoms such as irritability and even depression.
How serious is missing a few nights’ sleep? Sleep researchers conducted a study in which healthy adults between the ages of 21 and 38 were randomly placed in one of four restricted sleep conditions (Van Dongen et al., 2003). Participants began the experiment with at least three days of regular sleep and then were either allowed to get only four hours, six hours, or eight hours (this was the control group) of sleep each day for 14 days. A fourth group of participants was totally deprived of sleep (by being kept awake by the researchers) for three days in a row. Measurements of the participants’ cognitive abilities and physical alertness were taken every two hours during the scheduled “awake” times. The results showed that even in the six-hour sleep condition, participants’ abilities to function mentally and physically were as negatively affected as if they had been entirely deprived of sleep for two nights. All participants in the sleep-deprived and no-sleep conditions were seriously impaired in their functioning and were relatively unaware of the seriousness of the impairment. That the participants did not seem aware of their problems in functioning may account for the impression many people have that a few nights of poor sleep is not that serious. The results of this study seem to indicate that even moderate sleep loss is a serious problem.
The above is from the book “Psychology” by Saundra K. Ciccarelli and Gleen E. Meyer
reading this………..5:34am…………….DEPRIVED
Jack11: wow – thanks for going to the trouble to post all of that – very informative.
Two questions, Jack11.
Aren’t the “dreams” in NREM usually forgotten?
You are disoriented after waking from stage 4, isn’t that because your brain is still getting through the other stages?
Everyone dreams about "being chased" but tell me, do you feel tired afterward?
no……..
Was wondering, do colorblind people dream exclusively without color?
rbR: color blind people generally can see color – just differently from non-color blind people. I would guess that they dream in the color set they see in real life.