My dreaming mind has been VERY active lately. It is kinda surprising actually. I often go through phases of remembering and not remembering my dreams which is usually connected with my professional happiness. Anywho, my point to all of this is I have never paid attention to my dreams. In the past I brushed them of as being completely absurd but boyfriend encouraged me to look up what they may mean.
Here's what I learned...
1. One-third of your life 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, profound 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 may imply some protein deficiency or a personality disorder.
6. On average, you can dream anywhere from one to 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 dreams depend on whether they were blind at birth or became blind later in life. But vision is not the only sense that constitutes a dream. Sound, 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, regardless the content of the dream. In fact, "wet dreams" may not necessarily coincide with overtly sexual dream content.
14. People who are in the process of giving up smoking tend to 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. According to a research study, the most common setting for dreams is your own house.
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.
All fascinating thoughts but the most interesting thing I read was that your dreams are often feelings that you have during the day but don't act on for various reasons. Not that I am going to put much weight on my dreams but I find this whole thing a bit intriguing. For example, I have had 2 dreams in the last 3 nights where I was smuggling something. This is what one website had to say about it.
Smuggling
To dream that you are smuggling something, indicates that you are trying to claim what you feel is rightfully yours. Alternatively, the dream means that you are feeling locked out or denied of something. Consider what you are smuggling for additional significance.
The crazy part is that in both dreams the item(s) that I was smuggling were mine to begin with and someone else was trying to take them away. Anywho, I'm not really sure what it is all about or whether it is really about something at all but there it is. A night in the mind of Kathy...
