We spend roughly one third of our lives sleeping1—and during that time, we dream. While many theories exist to explain why we dream, no one yet fully understands their purpose or what exactly dreams mean. Some researchers believe they have symbolic meaning, while others believe that dreams are related to waking life.
What scientists do know is that just about everyone dreams every time they sleep, and those dreams can be fascinating, exciting, terrifying, or just plain weird. Here are 10 things you should know about dreams.
Everybody Dreams
The brain is active all night long, with particularly intense brain activity in the forebrain and midbrain during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is when we dream.
Adults and babies alike dream for around two hours per night—even if they don't remember it upon waking. In fact, researchers have found that people usually have several dreams each night, each one typically lasting for between five to 20 minutes.
You Can Control Your Dreams
A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you are dreaming even though you're still asleep. Lucid dreaming is thought to be a combination state of both consciousness and REM sleep, during which you can often direct or control the dream content.
Researchers say that people can use various techniques to learn how to lucid dream, including "mnemonic induction of lucid dreams" (MILD) and "senses initiated lucid dreams" (SSILD), which involve waking up after five hours and repeating a phrase like "I will remember my dreaming," or focusing on the stimuli (sights, sounds, sensations
Negative Dreams Are More Common
Over a period of more than 40 years, researcher Calvin S. Hall, PhD, collected over 50,000 dream accounts from college students. These reports were made available to the public during the 1990s by Hall's student William Domhoff.13 The dream accounts revealed that many emotions are experienced during dreams.
There are several factors that can impact the emotional content of dreams, including anxiety, stress, and certain medications. One study found that external stimuli, including good and bad smells, can play a role in positive and negative dreams.
Blind People May Dream Visually
In one study of people who have been blind since birth, researchers found that they still seemed to experience visual imagery in their dreams, and they also had eye movements that correlated to visual dream recall.16
Although their eye movements were fewer during REM than the sighted participants of the study, the blind participants reported the same dream sensations, including visual content.
What is lucid dreaming?
Typically, when we dream, we do not know that the dream is not real. As a character from the movie Inception quite aptly puts it, “Well, dreams, they feel real while we’re in them, right? It’s only when we wake up that we realize that something was actually strange.”
However, some people are able to enter a dream and be fully aware of the fact that they are actually dreaming.
“A lucid dream is defined as a dream during which dreamers, while dreaming, are aware they are dreaming,” specialists explain.
The very first record of lucid dreaming appears to feature in the treatise On Dreams by the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. In it, he describes an instance of self-awareness during a dream state.
When does it happen, and what is it like?
Like most dreams, lucid dreaming will typically occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. For some people it occurs spontaneously, but others train themselves to start dreaming lucidly (or to become better at it)
The conclusion highlights three concepts that were not predicted by dream theorists. Firstly, dreaming and other states of consciousness are related to changes in the level of brain activation. Secondly, that, independent of activation, the brain opens and closes its gates of sensory input and motor output. The third and perhaps most significant conclusion is that the brain not only self-activates and isolates itself from the world, but it changes its chemical climate very radically. Two of the chemical systems necessary to waking consciousness are completely shut off when the brain self-activates in sleep. It is this difference in brain chemistry that probably determines the differences between waking and dreaming consciousness..
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