Dreams Dream facts and interpretations: 1. One-third of your lives is spent sleeping. 2. In an average lifetime, you would have spent a total of about six years of it dreaming. That is more than 2,100 days spent in a different realm! 3. Dreams have been here as long as mankind. Back in the Roman Era, striking and significant dreams were submitted to the Senate for analysis and interpretation. 4. Everybody dreams. EVERYBODY! Simply because you do not remember your dream does not mean that you do not dream. In fact, you have several dreams during a normal night of sleep. 5. Dreams are indispensable. A lack of dream activity can mean protein deficiency or a personality disorder. 6. On average, you can dream anywhere from one or two hours every night. Moreover, you can have four to seven dreams in one night. 7. Blind people do dream. Whether visual images appear in their dream depends on whether they were blind at birth or became blind later in life. But vision is not the only sense that constitutes a dream. Sounds, tactility, and smell become hypersensitive for the blind and their dreams are based on these senses. 8. Five minutes after the end of the dream, half the content is forgotten. After ten minutes, 90% is lost. 9. The word dream stems from the Middle English word, dreme which means "joy" and "music". 10. Men tend to dream more about other men, while women dream equally about men and women. 11. Studies have shown that your brain waves are more active when you are dreaming than when we are awake. 12. Dreamers who are awakened right after REM sleep, are able to recall their dreams more vividly than those who slept through the night until morning. 13. Physiologically speaking, researchers found that during dreaming REM sleep, males experience erections and females experience increased vaginal blood flow - no matter what the content of the dream. In fact, "wet dreams" may not necessarily coincide with overtly sexual dream content. 14. People who are giving up smoking have longer and more intense dreams. 15. Toddlers do not dream about themselves. They do not appear in their own dreams until the age of 3 or 4. 16. If you are snoring, then you cannot be dreaming. 17. Nightmares are common in children, typically beginning at around age 3 and occurring up to age 7-8. 18. In a poll, 67% of Americans have experienced Deja Vu in their dreams, occurring more often in females than males. 19. Around 3% of adults suffer from sleep apnea. This treatable condition leads to unexplained tiredness and inefficiency. 20. Research has shown that the house is the most common setting for dreams. 21. It is very normal for males to experience an erection during the REM stage of sleep, even when they are not dreaming anything of a sexual nature. 22. The original meaning of the word "nightmare" was a female spirit who besets people at night while they sleep. Dreams our connection with simulated reality..... Dreams make perfect sense when you are asleep. Once awake, however, they leave you wondering where your mind took you, why you dreamed of what you did and the possible connections between your subconscious and conscious mind. Are the dreams of simulated reality doors to your inner conscious or are they unconnected events that let the mind and body relax? Simulated reality is an idea, a hypothesis. Reality, the state of things as they really exist, can become an idea that is virtually or computer simulated in a dream. Of course, the reference to a computer here is one the greatest, most misunderstood computers ever – our mind. Once asleep our minds are open to stimulation free of conscious thought. Our minds are free to use sensory perceptions in the dream state. It is open to desires, thoughts, actions, muscle function, and it replies, or makes-up, scenarios for our inner avatars. This act of artificial consciousness, the dream, is fully simulated and appears reality based while we are asleep. Once awake our conscious reasoning takes over and rebukes the dream, thus leaving the virtual world to manifest itself only in the subconscious realm. But do our dreams set patterns for conscious behavior? Do our dreams set subconscious goals? Does external reality really confer with our virtual, simulated reality through our dreams? Our dreams may be setting baseline goals for our conscious minds and may leave us questioning our own reality. They might even suggest the wild idea that we really don’t know the difference between our virtual world and one that is reality based. The Matrix© film series took this idea and treated the ability of the mind to be tricked into believing a mentally generated world is the “real world.” The thought processes include emigration simulation, where the dreamer enters simulation from an outer reality and enters into a brain/computer interface simulation. Once “in” the dreamers deploy a variety of methods to participate in the simulation in an effort to consciously break the two worlds apart and help their minds realize the differences between the two worlds. Dreamers face the same dilemma as they awake from a dream; it’s the separation process from simulated reality to conscious mind. We remember the dream as we come into the twilight of consciousness, but soon the dream fades from memory, unless it was a lucid dream. Dreamers often leave a notepad by their bed to jot down the events so they might interrupt them later. The dream world may leave you wondering where the events or basis of the dream came from. Surprisingly, people with amnesia are being researched for the answer. Some dream material comes from actual experiences. Such events or declarative memories, information you declare to be factual, whether you remember the lesson or event learned, may be the basis of some dreams. Episodic memory may also play a part in dreams. Episodic dreams come from events that leave lasting impressions on the conscious or subconscious mind. People who permanently suffer from amnesia can’t add new declarative or episodic memories. The parts of their brains involved in storing this type of information, primarily in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, have been damaged. Although amnesiacs can retain new information temporarily, they generally forget it a few minutes later. If dreams come from declarative memories, people with amnesia shouldn’t dream at all, or at least dream differently than others do, with one exception, they fail to recognize what they are dreaming about. Dream interpretation is almost a field of study itself. Dreaming of animals is said to symbolize the inner wildness of the dreamer. Clouds represent both good and bad things depending on whether the clouds are white and fluffy or dark and gloomy. Dreams of food indicate the dreamer is well taken care of, while dreams of garbage may symbolize the dreamer needs to rid themselves of something such as a bad habit or condition. During REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, our bodies go into sleep paralysis. The mind sees the dreams as near reality and goes into this temporary paralysis phase. And though you may not remember them, everyone dreams several times a night. Sleepy? Get a pen and pencil, place them by your bed, and get ready to spend some interesting time with your subconscious self. |