Ten Interesting Facts About Dreaming that Will Help You Sleep

Dreams are a part of everyone’s night. We all interpret it in different ways. Some feel that dreams are symbolic, some feel the mind is just filtering useless thoughts and some feel dreams have nothing to do with anything. Well, let us clear up some doubts with these 10 interesting facts about dreaming…

1. You forget 90% of your dreams

Do you know those people who keep dream journals? They are not crazy. They try to jot down everything they remember about their dreams as soon as they wake up because in 5 minutes, they will forget half of it and in 10 minutes, 90% of the dream is lost.

2. Everybody dreams, even the blind and animals

Absolutely everyone dreams. If you have a puppy and hear him softly barking at night, it is because he is barking in his dream. People who were born blind dream through their other senses without seeing images, while people who developed blindness after birth still see images in their dreams. Unless you are experiencing some psychological disorder, you too dream.

3. In our dreams, we only see faces we already know

Sometimes we may not recognize the face of a person in our dream, but we have definitely seen them. We see thousands of people throughout our lives, so our minds can pick and choose any random person, even those we have barely noticed.

4. Not everybody dreams in colour

12% of sighted people dream in black and white. This percentage was larger before the 1950s. This is possibly due to the change of media from black and white to coloured. Now, less than 4.4% of under 25-year-olds dream in black and white.

5. Dreams are symbolic

Dreams are deep. If you dream about talking back to your mother, it is not necessarily a sign that you need to stand up for yourself. In fact, it is most probably unrelated to that. It is something even deeper.

6. It is common to feel anxiety in your dreams

More often than not, we dream about negative feelings. Anxiety is probably the most common feeling in a dream.

7. You can have four to seven dreams in one night

In the one to two hours that we dream at night, we can have up to seven dreams. Although they seem much longer, each dream is only 3 – 5 minutes long.

8. Temporary body paralysis during dreaming is normal

Sometimes when you feel like you cannot move your body, it is your mind preventing the actions in the dream from truly happening to your body. This can happen before, during or even after you enter the dream state.

9. Men and women dream differently

Men typically dream about other men, while women have equal doses of men and women in their dreams. Also, men experience emotions more aggressively than women do in dreams.