Science's Response to the Study of Dreams

Kathy sent in this from a site where they like to list everything they can possibly imagine…even dreams. You can visit the site now or review the most obvious details here.

http://listverse.com/science/top-10-amazing-facts-about-dreams/

People blinded after birth can see images in their dreams. People born blind do not see images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch, and emotion. It is hard for a sighted person to imagine, but the body’s need for sleep is so strong that it can handle virtually all physical situations to make it happen.

Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream are forgotten. Within 10 minutes, 90% are gone. The famous poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, woke one morning about a fantastic dream - He described his “vision in a dream” in what became one of England’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 then, 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 Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while dreaming. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was also the brainchild of a dream.

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.

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 students’ brains made up for lost time by greatly increasing the percentage of sleep spent in the REM stage.

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.

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.

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. It’s like writing a poem and saying that a group of ants were like machines that never stop. You would never compare something to itself, for example: “That beautiful sunset was like a beautiful sunset.” So whatever symbol your dream picks up is most unlikely a symbol for itself.

People who have smoked cigarettes for a long time and stopped 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 one 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.”

 

This is called Dream Incorporation and is an experience 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.

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 a 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.”

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’s sleep.

Have a dream that you can’t figure out? You can check it out with The Dream Weaver;  or love working on dreams? Consider joining The Dream Discovery Club next year.

http://www.ruthlee-scribe.com/dreamweaver/index.htm