Psychological Facts About Dreams Of Someone

Dreams have been part of human experience since we first developed the ability to sleep at night. Unfortunately, there’s still much we don’t know about dreams or their causes, but researchers are starting to figure out some interesting things about this mysterious state of mind and its relation to everyday life. Here are eight startling psychological facts about dreams that you probably never knew!

 8 Startling Psychological Facts About Dreams


1) We have more control in our dreams than we think



Ever try to tell someone what happened in your dream only to find that you can’t seem to make yourself understood? Most of us don’t realize it, but we actually have a surprising amount of control over our dreams. It’s called lucid dreaming, and it means being aware while dreaming. Instead of passively accepting your dream scenario as gospel, you can take charge. In one experiment, researchers told test subjects they were going to be hooked up to an anxiety-producing device during sleep and that their ability to press a button would clear things up. Some participants managed to push the button in their dreams—and when they did, their anxiety dissipated without waking them up. Lucid dreaming may serve as a ‘psychological escape hatch’ for confronting fear, stress or trauma in waking life by allowing people to confront their fears on their own terms rather than at night through nightmares, says Harvard Medical School psychologist Deirdre Barrett. If we had such control during ordinary dreams, think how much more fun those could be!


2) We make connections more easily while sleeping



In research studies, people who have been deprived of sleep are quicker to recognize patterns in a group of random objects than those who got plenty of shut-eye. Which means that if you’re going to remember something — like an email address or a social security number — it’s better to be well-rested when you encounter it for the first time. If you want your brain to retain new information, don’t pull an all-nighter. Sleep on it! (literally) A lack of sleep makes us more likely to dream: We tend to recall less about our dreams if we sleep for only six hours, versus getting seven or eight hours per night.


3) We can hold conversations better in our sleep



You’re not totally asleep when you dream, but you’re also not awake. That makes dreams a unique kind of state in which we can carry on conversations with ourselves, even though we don’t remember them. This fascinating fact comes from research by Cesar Airioni and Patricia Deldin at Escola de Psicologia e Cirugia da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil. To conduct their study, they recorded subjects during stage 2 sleep and asked them to hold a conversation with themselves while they listened to recordings over headphones.


4) When sleeping, we can continue activities we had been doing earlier



When we dream, we can continue many of our activities from waking life. This has been a controversial topic in psychology for decades, with some studies supporting it and others contradicting it. The latest evidence supports that dreaming itself is somewhat continuous with our waking activities—meaning that even if your dreams aren’t about things you’ve done earlier in your day, they likely would have been if you were awake instead of sleeping. A study published in Nature Neuroscience found that people who are engaged in physical activity while asleep tend to have more physical activity-related dreams than those who are inactive while asleep. In fact, people who participated in sports during their childhood had more sports-related dreams than those who didn’t participate as children.


5) REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep Is Vital To Our Mental Health



Although we typically associate dreaming with REM sleep, there are multiple types of dreams that can occur at various points throughout your night. The four stages of sleep are non-REM (NREM) 1, 2 and 3 and REM. NREM 1 is light sleep and accounts for about 20 percent of your nightly slumber. NREM 2 is a deeper level of light sleep, as NREM 3 is still lighter than even NREM 2, only lasting for 5 percent of your sleeping time. Each stage gradually gets deeper until you reach REM; if you're sleeping more lightly, it's more likely that you'll dream at an earlier stage (like when you get woken up by a noise in your house).


6) We dream in black and white first, then color



While dreaming in color is a phenomenon more commonly associated with younger people, according to research from University of Hertfordshire, most adults dream in black and white first, then shift into full color later. This means that you might remember feeling disappointed because your dreams were only in black and white. However, on waking up, you should be thankful that your brain has shifted into full color mode before morning. If your dreams were in bright colors all night long, they could really affect your ability to get a good night’s sleep by keeping you from feeling tired when it’s time to wake up. Waking up too rested is never a good thing.


7) We dream in chronological order when we are awake but not when we are asleep



Contrary to what Freud suggested, dreams aren’t strictly based on events from our lives. Instead, when we are awake, our brains naturally reconstruct memories in a chronological order; while asleep and dreaming, they do not. As such, we dream in reverse order. For example, if you had dinner with your parents last night before going to bed at 10:00 p.m., your brain would dream about that event first thing in the morning—after you woke up—and then move onto other things that happened throughout your day, like meeting friends for lunch or attending an afternoon meeting at work.


8) Nighttime experiences affect your daytime moods



A study out of Tel Aviv University shows that what we dream about can influence our mood. In particular, pleasant dreams lift your spirits, while nightmares leave you feeling down and depressed. Even when you wake up from a bad dream in a good mood (or vice versa), that mindset may still affect how you behave throughout your day. If you tend to have more negative nighttime experiences than positive ones, consider whether or not a recent event is at play here—and take steps to change it! After all, you’re spending one-third of your life asleep; why not make sure those hours are as enjoyable as possible?

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