Amazing Facts About Dreams

• Blind people dream — People who become blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion.

• You forget 90 percent of your dreams — Within five minutes of waking, half of your dream if forgotten. Within ten minutes, 90 percent is gone.

• Everybody dreams — Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder) but men and women have different dreams and different physical reactions. Men tend to dream more about other men, while women tend to dream equally about men and women.

• We only dream of what we know — Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts, but did you know that your mind is not inventing those faces? They are real faces of real people that you have seen during your life but may not know or remember.

• Not everyone dreams in color — A full 12 percent of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white.

• Dreams are not about what they are about — If you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language.

• External stimuli invade our dreams — This is called Dream Incorporation and it is the experience that most of us have had where a sound from reality is heard in our dream and incorporated in some way. A similar (though less external) example would be when you are physically thirsty and your mind incorporates that feeling in to your dream.

• You are paralyzed while you sleep — Believe it or not, your body is virtually paralyzed during your sleep, most likely to prevent your body from acting out aspects of your dreams. According to a Wikipedia article on dreaming, “Glands begin to secrete a hormone that helps induce sleep and neurons send signals to the spinal cord which cause the body to relax and later become essentially paralyzed.”

• Toddlers do not dream about themselves until around the age of 3 — From the same age, children typically have many more nightmares than adults do until age 7 or 8.