Dreaming

Personally I am a lover of sleep. It is the perfect part of my day where I can lay down and rest my mind for a few hours. I take about 2-3 naps a day and without these naps I probably wouldn’t make it through the day. The magnificent part of sleeping is dreaming.. it is an escape from reality and often brings a sense of happiness. I always have the strangest dreams and I feel like the most random and unfamilar people show up in them. I have always wondered what this meant and why it happened.Dreaming

Many people are unaware of how complex our dreams can be. On average a person has about 4 to 6 dreams in one night and between 1, 460 to 2,190 dreams a year. When we dream we are dreaming during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) periods in our sleep. This period can occur for about 5 to 30 minutes and multiple times each night. Personally I have trouble remembering even just one of my dreams once I wake up. This is normal, most people forget about 95 to 99% of the dreams they have.

During Rapid Eye Movement sleep our body becomes paralyzed. Our body shuts down the release of neurotransmitters and essential muscles stop moving. However, some people have an abnormal Rapid Eye Movement sleep where there body does not shut down the neurotransmitters so they are able sleepwalkto act out the motions in their sleep. This can be very dangerous and have led to people breaking bones, and furniture. An extreme form of REM disorder is called Sleepwalking or somnambulism. People who sleepwalk walk and perform complex behaviors while they are in a deep sleep. Individuals can get up from bed and walk around the house or even leave the house and go long distances without waking up. This is seen in about 1% to 15% of the population.

Have you ever wondered who the people are in your dreams? Well they are all people who you have seen before! We tend to see people in our dreams whimages-1o are “strangers” that we have  seen before in our lives and remember. It can be someone you subconsciously remember seeing walking down the street. However, in real life you have “forgotten” these faces. Our brain physically cannot invent the image of a persons face. This way our brain creates these familiar faces as characters in our own complex mental picture.

Sources:

http://www.factswt.com/did-you-know-that-every-single-face-youve-seen-in-your-dreams-is-actually-of-someone-youve-seen-while/

http://www.omgfacts.com/news/297/11-Shocking-Facts-about-Dreams-that-will-Rock-Your-World-ab963-5

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/20-amazing-facts-about-dreams-that-you-might-not-know-about.html

http://www.2knowmyself.com/why_do_people_show_up_in_your_dreams

https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/dreaming

9 thoughts on “Dreaming

  1. Jinghao Zhang

    I always forget what I dream about during the night, and I believe you guys do as well. your article reminds me a study saying one doesn’t dream in very deep sleep. in other words, if you dream, you are likely not getting enough sleep. overall, it was a very interesting topic! thank you for sharing!

  2. Yu Zhang

    Your blog reveals some unbelievable figures in our real life: “4 to 6 dreams in one night and between 1, 460 to 2,190 dreams a year.” That is a lot of dreams. I want to talk more about the eye movement. Actually, when we are dreaming, our eyeballs rotate. (our eyes are still close!) The first person who observed this fact was an Austrian physician. He noticed that his son’s eyeballs were rotating when the boy is sleeping. He woke up the son and asked him what was going on. His son told him that he just had a dream. Based on the figure that people forget 95%-99% of their dreams, it is fortunate that the boy remembered his dream. Otherwise, we may be aware of this fact years later. As we talked in class, most of the scientific facts start as anecdotes or observations by people in our daily lives, so be curious of the world and make observations carefully. Maybe we will discover the next scientific wonder.

  3. Stephen John Murta

    I never remember my dreams and it is annoying, I used to remember them and then about 3 years ago i stopped remembering them. As I was scrolling through Reddit a few weeks ago I found this . This a website that emulates dreaming, but careful you need a dark room in order to start.

  4. Caroline Gail Stacks

    I find topics about sleeping completely fascinating, partly because I am a strange sleeper. I have vivid and memorable dreams every single night, I sleep talk, and I used to sleepwalk. I (thankfully) haven’t sleep walked in a while, but I did up until I was about 13, and it was scary! One time I apparently started to walk outside, but my parents were fortunately downstairs and walked me back to bed. The thing I found most interesting about your post, however, is how you said that sleepwalking is only seen in about 1-15% of the population! I had no idea that it was such a rare thing! Also I found it interesting how many people forget their dreams, since I can always remember mine every day! I know there are a million sites out there, such as this one , but I’m curious to know how many of the methods actually work!

  5. Shannon Bridget Obrien

    Nice post! I really enjoyed reading it. The huffington post posted an article about the 14 most common dreams and what they mean. Your post made me think of this article !

  6. Philip Littleton

    It is most intriguing how the brain works, especially when we are sleeping. To answer your last question, it is possible to control your own dreams! Lucid dreaming is when you are sleeping; however, you are subconsciously awake. Therefore, you can control what happens in your dreams as if you are the creator in your own world!

  7. Caitlin Emily Whelan

    Wow I had no idea we have 4-6 dreams each night! I normally only remember one long dream, if I remember any at all! As soon as I wake up I remember most of it, but later I end up forgetting the whole dream. I never really thought about the real amount of time my dream was. I just assumed it was the whole night. But apparently some are only 5 minutes! That is so crazy how the people we do not know in our dreams are strangers that we have seen before. I have also always wondered why a random one of my friends has appeared in my dream. Apparently this is what it means!

  8. cfl5109

    Intersting post! I really found the fact that most people forget 95-99% of their dreams upon waking because I never remember my dreams, I don’t even remember the last one that I had, I couldn’t tell you about. One thing I would find interesting is if and how we can control people’s dreams. I wonder if it is possible to be able to create dreams in ones mind while they are sleeping, or if a person can learn to control their own dreams like the movie Inception!

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