We aren’t going to waste a lot of time here because we aren’t sure about you, but we find dreams fascinating. In fact, most of our search history consists of us looking up our dreams trying to figure out what it all means. With that being said, today we’re getting schooled on some strange and unusual facts about our dreams. Let’s get into it!
(image via: new atlas)
During REM, your muscles are actually paralyzed. Why? Temporary muscle paralysis keeps you from acting out your dreams.
You can only dream about faces you’ve already seen. Okay, our mind is blown a little bit because again, we don’t know about you, but we’ve certainly had a fair share of dreams where people didn’t actually have faces, we just kind of assumed they were there.
Have you ever had a dream that made absolutely no sense at all? Well, there’s a reason for that! When we’re awake the front part of our brain makes sense of the world around us, but while we’re sleeping, this system is shut down; because of this our brain just kind of does its own thing and that’s when crazy scenarios that make zero sense occur.
Talk about taking things for granted, we don’t all dream in color. In fact, a whopping 12% of people dream in black and white.
Most of us have probably experienced the ominous feeling of forgetting our dream after X amount of time, and most of us have probably experienced the polar opposite of that. But the science of it is that within five minutes of waking up, we’ve already forgotten 50% of our dreams.
(image via: the list)
The big question is, of course, why do we dream the dreams we dream? Well, scientists actually can’t come to a conclusion on this matter. Some say they mean nothing, some say we have them because only certain parts of our brains are working while we sleep, some say they have value, some say they act as therapy, some say – okay, you get it.
If you find yourself having recurring nightmares, like bad ones, like ones that affect your ability to function, then you could very well have a condition called nightmare disorder.
The average person spends a whopping six years of their life dreaming.
We all see things in our dreams, including those that are blind.
Have you ever noticed that you have more negative dreams than positive ones? That’s totally normal. It’s more common for people to have a negative dream than a positive one. So even in our dreams, we dwell on negativity? Awesome.