Dreams have been a topic of interest from the very beginning of time. There have been manuscripts are experiments related to dreams even before the field of Psychology came into the picture. And it doesn’t just interest academicians and philosophers, every human being might have wondered about the concept of dreams at some point in their lives.
That being said, there still isn’t a lot we have figured out about dreams. And it is quite difficult to get to know dreams in an authentic manner as well. The current data we have are based on EEG measurements and introspections alone. But we are still trying to unravel the mystery.
It is said that people on average spend 6 years of their lifespan dreaming. Such an important event in our life that we spend 6 whole years for, and we still are not in agreement why we do it. Obviously, this article is not gonna provide you with that answer. Rather, let me bend your mind with 5 interesting facts about dreaming that you might not have heard before.
1. Your brain is more active when you are asleep
It is true that the primary reason one sleeps is to regain strength and repair body tissues. It is a time to rest. However, even while your body rests during sleep, your brain is buzzing with activity, especially when you are dreaming. There are multiple theories on how this is important. But the most prominent ones suggest that sleep is a time for the brain to make sense of all the information acquired when awake. Adding to the merit of this point, it is evident that we sleep and dream for a longer duration when we are met with a big life change- positive or negative.
2. All the characters in your Dreams are people you know
If you try to remember a dream, you’ll see that it isn’t that easy as it seems. You’ll also find it difficult to remember the faces you saw in your dreams. However, the faces that you do remember would be quite familiar to you. This is because your subconscious can’t conjure up a face from nothing. All the faces you see in your dreams are stolen from your memory. This doesn’t mean that all the characters in your dreams are people you are close with. But the main characters are often people you have a strong connection with.
3. You can’t read in your dreams
This might surprise you a bit. You can’t dream in your dreams. You might come across scientific concepts and mathematical problems (may not be the content in a teenager’s dream), but all those things would be represented as images or practical events. Even if you get hold of a book in your dream, the letters would drift apart or disappear. This is because you need your conscious mind to carry out this activity. So, reading is out of the equation. Hell, you won’t even be able to read a clock, which a lot of people take as a reality check in dreams (dibs on counting fingers). Interestingly, you won’t be able to see yourself in a dream mirror either. Now you know where those crazy scenes from horror movies came from.
4. Gender differences in dreams
Men and women dream differently. These differences may not necessarily be a product of biology but of social circumstances. Researches on dreams reveal that there are quite a lot of differences in the content and other variables related to dreaming among genders.
Men dream more about weapons than women and women dream more about clothes. Kind of makes you think that clothes are feminine equivalent to weapons for men. In men’s dream, there is a lot more physical activity and aggression whereas women’s dream mostly has an emotional theme like rejection or exclusion. Also, women dream a bit more than men on average and they have more conversations and more characters in their dreams. And for some reason, in men’s dreams, men appear twice as more as women. Meanwhile, it is almost a homogeneous crowd in the case of women’s dreams. What these differences imply is another question entirely. And we are still in search of answers.
5. Dreams have changed History
All you remember from the countless dreams you have had might be that goofy alien spaceship fantasy or that romantic dinner date with your crush, but there have been some astonishing dreams recorded in the history. Some changed the course of history and others, well others just were interesting.
You might have heard that Albert Einstein came up with the concept of E=MC² in his dream and the Wright brothers saw their plane design in their dreams. Well, these cases are not actually verified. They could be true but probably are just cooked up. But there have been other cases, like for example, Larry Page came up with his idea of Google, Mendeleev came up with the concept of the periodic table of elements, James Watson envisioned the DNA double helix, Tesla got the idea of an alternating current generator, all in their dreams. This doesn’t mean that the next crazy dream you remember would place you in the pages of history. But it is possible that your next big idea might be somehow encrypted in your dreams.
