25 Surprising Facts About Dreams: What Happens in the Brain While We Are Sleeping

Centuries of torment, what the subconscious mind holds inside encourages some of the most brilliant pieces of genius ever created in dreams. Colored dreams, lucid dreaming, emotional processing-nothing is left without its interesting facts. From affecting our mental health to helping us find the solution for actual problems in our real life, dreaming is not some quirk associated with sleep but part and parcel of our overall well-being.

Let's look at 25 interesting facts about dreams: how they work, the effects they have on the mind and body, and the incredible influences they may have on our lives.

1. Your Brain Needs to Dream to Stay Sane

Besides being an interesting side effect of sleeping, the process of dreaming greatly influences one's psychological condition. Even if a person has had enough night-time rest, dream deprivation will result in psychoses. People who become REM-deprived-that is, a stage in sleep when most dreams occur-begin to develop irritability, hallucinations, and inability to concentrate in only a few days. Because this was allowing these people, once again, to dream, their brains went immediately into deep REM sleep as a way to make up for lost dream time.

2. Dreams help to solve problems.

Great minds throughout history have indeed credited their dreams with solutions to complex problems for several reasons. Not because our brains are not working when we sleep-they think abstractly, recognize patterns, and show insight. Maybe for that reason, scientists, inventors, and artists, such as August Kekulé, who described a dream that finally led to his discovery of the structure of benzene, or James Cameron, whose fever dream gave birth to The Terminator, find breakthrough ideas while sleeping.

3. Dreams help in physical and mental health.

It consolidates memories, especially emotional ones. It processes painful emotional experiences and traumas, reducing their emotional impact. A decline in dreams may be your first sign of sleep disruption or impending health issues. Even nightmares can be functional, preparing us emotionally for the trials ahead.

4. Quitting Leads to Vivid Dreams

Ex-smokers often report a number of very vivid and intense dreams after quitting, usually to do with smoking. In studies, they have been linked to nicotine withdrawal, with roughly a third of smokers reporting them in the first few weeks of quitting. Most of the dreams reported are filled with feelings of guilt or panic and represent some sort of internal struggle.

5. Differences between Men and Women's Dreams

Men and women differ in their dreams. Women's dreams are reported to include both sexes about equally in their contents along with more emotional content. Men's dreams, as might be expected, often contain male characters and are more often related to such themes as violence or cars. About 8% of all dreams include some form of sexual content. The themes differ between the sexes; men often have dreams involving a public place, while women have dreams involving an intimate setting.

6. Lucid Dreaming-How to Control Your Dreams

Lucid dreaming is when the dreamer realizes that they are, in fact, dreaming and may subsequently enter into and control the plot of the dream. It can further be the unusual opportunity to freely explore the dream world with flying or supernatural powers. Researchers have also found that gamers are more likely to experience this than others; perhaps gamers gain experience from controlled virtual environments that helps them in their dream states.

7. Freudian theory on dreams

Sigmund Freud viewed dreams as a path towards understanding our unconscious, where we express ourselves with desires that are more deeply held and our choked instincts. In his psychoanalytic theory, he defines dreams as containing two contents: one manifest-that which we can remember-and one latent-underlying, generally taboo, desires. Though mostly discredited, his work on these theories has had a profound impact on the conceptualization of dreaming today as essentially a symbolic activity.

8. We also forget 90% of our dreams.

Within five minutes of being awake, 50% of all dreams are forgotten, and after 10 minutes, as much as 90% is lost. As fragile as it is, one may hardly appreciate how such an 'other' life-our dreams-can affect us. And it isn't easy even for famous authors: Samuel Taylor Coleridge blamed poor dream recall for his interrupted creation of "Kubla Khan."

9. Why Some People Just Don't Remember Their Dreams

Individual experiences of dream recall can vary wildly: while some people regularly remember their dreams, others-about 1 in 250-rarely do. Neuroscientists such as Raphael Vallat have only recently begun investigating the mechanisms of this. In addition, women tend to dream more than men; once more, this is perhaps no more biologically founded than socially based.

10. Loneliness is associated with brighter dreams.

Lonely feelings can spill over into your dream life. In fact, several studies by neurologist Patrick McNamara find that the insecure, avoidant, or troubled type in relationships tends to have more vivid and stronger dreams-more often darker or more macabre-simply because the brain attempts in some manner to substitute for emotional solitude.

11. The Activation-Synthesis Model

A biological explanation of dreams, the activation-synthesis model, argued in 1977 that sources of neural signals, such as the amygdala, fire off during a dream in a non-rhythmic manner, and even though the brain attempts to make some sense out of those neural impulses through the construction of a narrative, because of that, many times the construction ends in the bizarre or illogical nature of the dream.

12. Not everybody has colored dreams.

Only about 12 percent dream in straight black and white. Color in dreams may also depend on whether one watches color or black-and-white media. What is most interesting: People who grew up in homes where they only watched black-and-white TV tend to dream in black-and-white and people who grew up only watching color TV tend to dream in color.

13. We spend six years of our lives dreaming.

We spend six years of our lifetime only in dreaming. In fact, all those nocturnal sojourns, weirdness, and not-so-frequent nightmares add up to quite a heap of time. Still more astonishingly, seven years of our whole life are spent just in trying to sleep!

14. Deja Vu Dreams

Deja Vu in dreams-that is a feeling when you think you have already lived that moment or scene. According to experts, that is because a dream combines fragments of different memories of various events. Yet another explanation suggests that while dreaming the brain enacts variations of what happens in reality; therefore, if in real life a similar set of conditions happens, it may trigger this feeling.

15. Sleep paralysis: when your body freezes up in REM sleep.

In REM sleep, your body is temporarily set into a state of natural paralysis called REM atonia. A function of REM atonia is to take away movement so you won't act out your dreams, which would be dangerous. If you happen to wake up during this stage you may experience sleep paralysis-very terrifying when you feel completely awake but can't move. Some say these can explain some of the alien abduction myths.

16. You Can't Read in Your Dreams

Ever try to read a book in a dream? Most likely you couldn't make out in the world what the words said. Quite literally, during sleep, the parts of the brain that engage in language take a backseat, making reading and writing quite hard in dreams. A dream to most minds is made of emotions and images instead of coherent text.

17. Schizophrenia and States of Dreaming

It reflects the condition of people with schizophrenia since their thoughts are always disorganized during wakefulness; similarly, dreams portray a situation where one's mind is disorganized. With such similar patterns in the brain activity during the dream state, a dream can be described as a short journey into the kind of mental bedlam that others experience every day.

18. Acting Out Dreams: REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD)

Individuals with RBD act their dreams out because their body is unable to enter into the temporary paralysis that characterizes REM sleep. In this situation, the person is highly susceptible to getting into dangerous situations should the dream scene include violence or other forms of intensity. Of course, this needs treatment so that injury to the dreamer and the sleep partner can be prevented.

19. Dreams Power Creativity

It is well-known that creativity and dreams have been closely interlinked. A person who doesn't dream much usually loses out in matters of creativity and problem-solving. Having this dream journal beside one's bed allows the writing down of fragments remembered upon waking up and serves as an idea well for the creative projects.

20. Chase Dreams: Confronting Fears in Dreamland

Being chased is considered one of those universal nightmares. The pursuer can be anything from monsters to animals, or even intimidating figures from your real life. Most of those pursuits in dreams would relate to unresolved fears or unresolved situations in your waking life, in which you are going through tension. Identifying who gives chase in your dream could help you face the problem squarely in the face.

21. Familiar Faces in Dreams

Your brain can't create new faces when you sleep. Every face that appears in your dream is from someone you have seen, either consciously or unconsciously, somewhere in your life. Even if some of the faces seem unfamiliar, more often than not, your brain could have stored the image from a chance encounter, like people you happened to pass on the street.

22. The Power of Smell in a Dream

Believe it or not, odors can influence our dreaming. In one study, for instance, people exposed to foul odors that smelled like rotten eggs reported nightmares, while others, who were exposed to more sweet-smelling fragrances smelling like roses, reported higher ratios of dreams that were pleasant. Odors can radically alter the emotional tone in a dream, even if the dream is not about the odor itself.

23. Do Babies Dream?

As infants spend so much time in REM sleep, it is assumed by scientists that they do dream. As none can ever tell the truth, most likely the babies are dreaming about the familiar faces and sensations from their day-to-day experiences. Nightmares usually do not happen until the age of two, by which their imagination would have started to develop.

24. Animals Sleep Too

Some studies prove that animals actually do experience REM sleep; hence, they also dream like human beings. Research on rats proves that they actually trot the tape of events occurring when they were awake during their sleep, as done by human beings. Dogs and cats are seen to twitch or shift during their sleep, perhaps dreaming of running after balls or preying respectively.

25. Fever Dream That Gave Us The Terminator

But probably the most iconic science fiction movies born from a fever dream is Terminator. Fighting against a 102-degree fever, he dreamed of a robotic torso crawling from an explosion; the image clung to him while he created the relentless assassin now known as The Terminator.

Conclusion: Dreaming-A Window into the Mind

Ranging from tapping into the subconscious mind and fostering creativity to solving complicated problems, few people realize that dreams serve other purposes other than transient ones. As a matter of fact, some of the biggest scientific discoveries and profound pieces of art known to humankind have been facilitated through dreams. As we unmask more mysteries of dreams, obviously, there are secrets kept by the surreal world of dreams.