Facts About Dreams: 10 Interesting Facts About Dreaming

Dreams are an amalgamation of images, memories, emotional sensations, and other subconscious stimuli that human beings and certain other animals experience while asleep. While it’s possible to dream in other phases of sleep, the rapid eye movement or REM sleep stage is when you’re most likely to experience dreaming.

The subconscious mind borrows from real-life experiences to construct these surreal and sleep-induced phenomena. Dreams sometimes form somewhat coherent narratives, but they also might feel more like completely random impressions in quick succession on occasion, too.

The study of dreams still produces just as many questions as answers, but sleep scientists are certain these strange nighttime occurrences are essential to mental health and well-being. Dreaming helps people wake up feeling fully rested and refreshed each morning, as they sort through the memories and experiences of the past day.

If you transition from a waking state into sleep for long enough, you’ll almost inevitably dream. You spend one-third of your life asleep, meaning the average person will dream for almost six years’ worth of time before they die. Once your sleep cycle progresses beyond non-REM (or NREM sleep) into the REM stage of sleep, you’re even more likely to have vivid dreams, intense dreams that linger in your mind and feel similar to real-life memories.

Dreams are a formative aspect of any good night’s sleep. While it’s possible you might not remember your dreams when you wake up, brain scan imagery and studies have confirmed time and again that people enter dream states routinely each night even when they wake up without any memory of the experience.

Deciphering the meaning of dreams on an individual basis can be very difficult, but there’s still plenty of concrete information about these phenomena in a general sense. Consider these ten intriguing facts about dreams:

1. 1. Dream interpretation is not a science. Sigmund Freud made interpretation one of the main linchpins of his psychology of dreams. In the decades since Freud’s death, however, it’s become increasingly apparent that the content of dreams is harder to decipher than he thought. Some dream research seems to indicate dreams might, in fact, be completely random and nearly impossible to interpret. Still, you can keep a dream journal and come up with your own interpretations.
2. 2. Dreaming is most common in the morning. You might find you remember your dreams better just after awakening in the morning. This is because you spend more time in the REM stage of sleep right before waking, leading to vivid and longer dreams. It’s possible to have dreams during the deep sleep common throughout the night, but they’ll likely be a little harder to remember once you wake up hours later.
3. 3. Less stress leads to better dreams. Stress and other negative emotions lead to problems like depression, high blood pressure, and bad dreams, too. If you notice yourself only having negative dreams or even nightmares, consider seeking mental health care to see if there might be an underlying issue you need to resolve. Once you achieve a greater sense of inner tranquility, you’ll likely have better types of dreams, too.
4. 4. Memories inform your dreams. Waking life experiences seep into your subconscious, laying the foundation for your future dreams. Some neuroscience professionals believe short-term to long-term memory consolidation happens during the dreaming process. Others insist dreams are a way the brain prepares human beings to handle future events as well.
5. 5. Men and women dream differently. While everyone can dream about all sorts of different things, there are some core differences in common dream themes between men and women. For instance, men dream more often about having to act aggressively, while women tend to have dreams about hard conversations or experiencing rejection.
6. 6. Negative dreams are more common. Bad dreams are unfortunately far more common than good ones for most people. This is partially due to the amount of stress many experience in their daily lives. This might be because of the neurons and neurotransmitters flooding in and out of the amygdala (the fear center of the brain) often during sleep. Some sleep doctors use antidepressants or forms of sleep medicine to help treat nightmare disorders of this variety.
7. 7. Part of your brain shuts down while you dream. The prefrontal cortex—or the part of the brain that makes sense of the wide array of stimuli you encounter while awake—shuts down while you dream. This leads to dreams taking on their bizarre and sometimes nonsensical quality, as you lose out on the ability to sift through your brain activity rationally.
8. 8. While dreaming, you’re motionless. Your brain makes it impossible for you to move while you’re dreaming, at least in most cases. This prevents you from being able to act out your dream experiences physically, which would potentially lead to injury. Still, sleep disorders can develop on this front. For example, sleep paralysis causes you to remain temporarily paralyzed (and often hallucinating) as you enter a waking state, while sleepwalking occurs when your brain fails to prevent you from acting out your dreams.
9. 9. You can take control of your dreams. Some dreamers tap into the ability to remain semiconscious in especially ornate and visual dreams. This process, known as lucid dreaming, allows you to take on an active role in the storyline your subconscious weaves. Through learning how to lucid dream, you can hone your problem-solving abilities and overall imaginative capacity even as you sleep.
10. 10. You are likely to forget most of your dreams. Your brain remains at a lower level of cognition throughout the entirety of the dreaming process, and this makes it hard for most people to remember what they even dreamed about the night before. Dream recall is freshest right after you wake up and gradually fades throughout the day. Recurring dreams are slightly easier to remember since they happen repetitively.

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