10 Things You Didn’t Know About Dreams

Have you ever had a mind-blowing dream?  Maybe you’ve dreamed about riding a horse in attempt to escape a flock of ducks, chasing you on the moon! If so, you aren’t alone. Things can get weird in the human subconscious.

While you slumber, your brain can sometimes tell stories that take on impossible scenarios. Most of the time, you don’t remember these crazy stories. But—if you do wake up and happen remember the dream, you’re almost always scratching your head asking, “What the heck just happened?”

Researchers don’t know why we have the dreams we do, or why we even dream at all. This makes our dreams one of the biggest question marks in science. Studies, however, have taught us a few cool facts to ponder while we try to make sense of it all.

So, what do we know? What actually happens when we snooze?

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Dreams

1. Within 10 minutes of waking up, you forget all or almost all of your dream.
2. Your brain can’t create faces in dreams. That means you’ve encountered every person you dream about at some point in your life, whether it be a close friend or someone you passed on the street.
3. The average person can have up to seven dreams in one night.
4. Vitamin B, nicotine patches, and melatonin have been correlated with more vivid dreams.
5. Dreams during REM sleep are more peculiar and detailed and usually have a storyline.
6. Dreams that happen in the stages of sleep before REM tend to be simpler and shorter.
7. You are more likely to remember a dream if you are woken up during REM sleep.
8. Your brain is more active when you’re dreaming than when you’re awake.
9. You don’t become the star of your own dreams until about age 4. Before then, you aren’t even a part of your dreams.
10. You become physically paralyzed during REM sleep. Scientists believe this is to prevent sleepwalking and other dangerous activities while dreaming.

Dreams are an age-old mystery.  There’s still so much we don’t know and if you’re like us, you’ve got plenty of questions! Do dreams operate as a form of self-therapy or are they simply an entertaining muse? Do our dreams have meaning, or are they random and unintentional?

We’ve all been dreaming since before we were born, so it should come as no surprise that we all have similar questions. But, before you pick up your torches and pitchforks in pursuit of answers, think about how hard it is to decode what’s happening in our subconscious, even while we’re awake. Researchers are literally trying to read our minds!

Although there’s still so much we don’t know about dreams, scientists are slowly piecing together the mystery. But until then, we’ll keep wondering why that flock of ducks was chasing us on the moon.

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