If you are interested to discover how long a dream lasts, how many dreams you dream in an average night and many more interesting facts about dreams you have arrived at the right place.
The diverse and fascinating dreams that our brain produces while we sleep, are a wonderful phenomenon full of question marks, which occupies humans for thousands of years.
Even if you do not always remember it happened, we all dream a wide variety of dreams every night, with the rough estimate of science determining that 25% of our sleep time is dedicated to dreams.
Animals also dream, and if you have a dog or cat and watched them sleeping, you certainly noticed how they run in fields or catch mice in their sleep.
So what is actually a dream?
According to the definition, it is a subjective experience of imaginary sights and sensations during sleep which includes several prominent features, including unawareness that it is a dream, inability to control the dream and guide the course of events in it and lack of activation of the critique and judgment mechanism.
Now we can speak practically.
If dreams interest you, here are some fascinating facts about them that you probably did not know.
How much do we actually remember from the dream?
Basically, we forget 90% of the dreams we dreamed during sleep.
Within 5 minutes from the moment of awakening we forget 50% of the dream and it does not matter if we were at its peak when we opened our eyes.
After 10 minutes from the moment we woke up 90% of the dream is forgotten.
Snoring and dreams do not go well together
Snoring during sleep is a common problem for millions of humans.
Most people who snore chronically suffer from Rapid Eye Movement (REM) disorder.
During REM sleep, humans experience irregular breathing, increased blood pressure, body paralysis and sequences of dreams.
However, those people who snore will not remember their dreams at a higher rate than people who do not snore.
Conclusion: if you want to wake up in the morning and remember your dreams, maybe to take care of the snoring problem, it will certainly also make your partner hear and sleep better, so everyone comes out as winners.
Blind people also dream
People who became blind after birth can see shapes and figures in their dreams.
People born blind do not see figures and shapes,
yet the dream experience is no less intense and is expressed through other senses such as hearing, smell and is also accompanied by strong emotions.
Symbols in dreams
Dreams are presented in a significantly deep way.
It does not matter which symbol appears in the dream, its meaning is not its abstract form. “The dream is a wish fulfillment.”
According to the Freudian approach, the dream serves as a psychic mechanism to defend against frustrations, desires and instincts suppressed in daily life.
Through a system of symbols, the dream protects us from direct exposure of the conscious which could harm the psyche and shows us the right way.
How long does a dream last and how many dreams do we dream every night?
In total we spend about a third of our lives sleeping.
Every night during sleep, on average between four and seven dreams appear, with a total duration of about an hour and a half.
Animals also dream dreams
Research conducted on many animals showed brain activity during sleep that indicated a state of dreaming.
During sleep our body is paralyzed
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) is a stage that lasts for 20-25 percent of total sleep, about 90-120 minutes.
During this stage, the body is essentially paralyzed by a brain mechanism to prevent us from performing in reality the movements in our dream. Sometimes this paralysis may fade slightly after the awakening stage begins. In this state, we are awake but feel that we cannot move. Spooky.
Men and women dream differently
Surprisingly, men tend to dream more about men.
About 70% of the characters in men’s dreams are other men.
On the other hand, women’s dreams contain an almost equal number of men and women.
Additionally, men experience more aggressive emotions in their dreams than women.
Prophetic dream
Surveys conducted on prophetic dreams show that 20% of the population believe they have experienced a prophetic dream of some kind during their life.
About 70% experienced a déjà vu (a phenomenon where a person feels as if they have already experienced a situation occurring in the present).
Also, more than 70% of the population surveyed believe that prophetic dreams are real.
Lucid dreaming
Also known as lucid dreaming, it is a phenomenon that occurs when a person is aware that they are dreaming while asleep.
This awareness allows the person to control their actions in the “dream space.”
Lucid dreamers, called “oneironauts,” report that during lucid dreams they can consider all circumstances related to wakefulness and even act in the dream at will, all while in a dream space perceived as extremely real.
A person in a state of lucid dreaming with full control can turn the dream space into any virtual reality they wish.
Why we do not remember dreams
We dream already in the womb
The importance of the dream can be seen from infancy: babies spend up to 70% of the day sleeping, 50% of this time they dream.
Considering that the first years of life are dedicated to extremely accelerated development of memory and learning abilities, it seems that dream sleep plays an important role in brain development.
In fact, we dream even before birth.
Thanks to dozens of studies and the development of ultrasound devices, we now know that in week 32 of pregnancy, when the fetus reaches the final stage of development, it spends about 90% of the day sleeping, in three different patterns: deep sleep, dream sleep, and intermediate states.
During dream sleep, the fetus’s eyes move back and forth, similar to eye movements of sleeping adults.
From this, researchers concluded that fetuses also dream.
Dreams prevent psychosis
Recent studies on sleep showed that students who were woken at the beginning of the dream but still allowed 8 hours of sleep, all experienced difficulties in concentration, irritability, hallucinations and signs of psychosis after 3 days.
When they stopped waking them at the start of dreams, the students began to make up for lost time and slept a greater number of hours.
We only dream about what we know
Our dreams are full of strangers who take part in them but did you know that our brain does not invent these faces? These are real faces, of real people you have seen in your life but do not remember.
The bad person in your last dream could be the person who fueled your parents’ car when you were a child.
We have all been exposed to hundreds of thousands of faces during our lives, so we have an endless pool of characters used by our brain during dreams.
Not everyone dreams in color
About 12% of people with normal vision dream in black and white.
All the rest dream in color.
It is not known whether a dream related to death or violence generates more emotions in people who dream in black and white or in those who dream in color.
Ex smokers dream richer dreams
People who smoked cigarettes for a long time and quit reported that they experience much more vivid dreams than before.
Additionally, according to studies conducted among 293 smokers examined for 1 to 4 weeks, a third of them reported having at least one dream about smoking.
In most dreams they smoked and felt particularly negative emotions, such as panic and regret.
Dreams about smoking result from tobacco withdrawal, and 97% of respondents claimed they never dreamed about smoking while they smoked.
Sleepwalkers’ dreams
Sleepwalkers are people who walk in their sleep and suffer from overly deep dream sleep: they go on adventures at night inspired by their dreams.
The good, the bad, and the ugly
For some unknown reason, there are more bad dreams than good dreams. The three most reported emotions in connection to dreams are anger, sadness, and fear.
