Dream facts and tidbits in life of you

Dreams is defined in Webster’s Dictionary as a “sequence of sensations, images, thoughts, etc., passing through a sleeping person’s mind” . Dreams have been a topic of study dating back to 4000 B.C. One may say that dreams have been around as long as the first civilization came to be and are just a normal part of human existence. In our dreams, we can go anywhere, we can be anybody, and we can do anything.

• Dream in history of mankind

When we dream, we are like passengers on a moving train, unable to control our actions and choose surroundings. We let our mind take over. Sometimes, dreams can be understood in the the context of repressed thoughts. Dreaming serves as an outlet for those thoughts and impulses we repress during the day. When we go to sleep at night and slip into our dream state, we feel liberated and behave and act in a manner that we do not allow ourselves in our waking life.Visions and ideas can come from your dreams. Authors, screenwriters and poets turn to their dreams for stories. Artists and musicians explore dreams for their inspiration. Dreams can help us find solutions to our daily problems and see things from a different perspective.

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.
23. In dreams, negative emotions tend to occur twice as often as pleasant feelings. Fear and anxiety are the most commonly expressed emotions  in dreams, followed by anger and sadness.