# Sleep and Dreams > General Dream Discussion >  >  Dream Facts

## Miracle

10. 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. It is hard for a seeing person to imagine, but the body’s need for sleep is so strong that it is able to handle virtually all physical situations to make it happen.

9.You Forget 90% of your Dreams

Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream if forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone. The famous poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, woke one morning having had a fantastic dream (likely opium induced) - he put pen to paper and began to describe his “vision in a dream” in what has become one of English’s most famous poems: Kubla Khan. Part way through (54 lines in fact) he was interrupted by a “Person from Porlock“. Coleridge returned to his poem but could not remember the rest of his dream. The poem was never completed.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
[…]
Curiously, Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the story of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde whilst he was dreaming. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was also the brainchild of a dream.

8. 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. In addition, both men and women experience sexually related physical reactions to their dreams regardless of whether the dream is sexual in nature; males experience erections and females experience increased vaginal blood flow.

7. Dreams Prevent Psychosis

In a recent sleep study, students who were awakened at the beginning of each dream, but still allowed their 8 hours of sleep, all experienced difficulty in concentration, irritability, hallucinations, and signs of psychosis after only 3 days. When finally allowed their REM sleep the student’s brains made up for lost time by greatly increasing the percentage of sleep spent in the REM stage. 

6. We Only Dream of What We Know

Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts - 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? The evil killer in your latest dream may be the guy who pumped petrol in to your Dad’s car when you were just a little kid. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces through our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams

5. Not Everyone Dreams in Color

A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. People also tend to have common themes in dreams, which are situations relating to school, being chased, running slowly/in place, sexual experiences, falling, arriving too late, a person now alive being dead, teeth falling out, flying, failing an examination, or a car accident. It is unknown whether the impact of a dream relating to violence or death is more emotionally charged for a person who dreams in color than one who dreams in black and white.

4. 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. The unconscious mind tries to compare your dream to something else, which is similar. Its like writing a poem and saying that a group of ants were like machines that never stop. But you would never compare something to itself, for example: “That beautiful sunset was like a beautiful sunset”. So whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself.

3. Quitters have more vivid dreams

People who have smoked cigarettes for a long time who stop, have reported much more vivid dreams than they would normally experience. Additionally, according to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology: “Among 293 smokers abstinent for between 1 and 4 weeks, 33% reported having at least 1 dream about smoking. In most dreams, subjects caught themselves smoking and felt strong negative emotions, such as panic and guilt. Dreams about smoking were the result of tobacco withdrawal, as 97% of subjects did not have them while smoking, and their occurrence was significantly related to the duration of abstinence. They were rated as more vivid than the usual dreams and were as common as most major tobacco withdrawal symptoms.”

2. 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. My own experience of this includes repeatedly drinking a large glass of water in the dream which satisfies me, only to find the thirst returning shortly after - this thirst… drink… thirst… loop often recurs until I wake up and have a real drink. The famous painting above (Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening) by Salvador Dali, depicts this concept.

1. 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 the 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.”

*Bonus: Extra Facts*
1. When you are snoring, you are not dreaming.
2. 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.
3. If you are awakened out of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, you are more likely to remember your dream in a more vivid way than you would if you woke from a full night sleep.

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## Mes Tarrant

How do they know that kids don't dream about themselves until age 3?

And what if someone has chronic snoring and literally snores throughout the night... is that person supposedly not dreaming the entire night then? Contradicts the "everybody dreams" bit.

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## Xox

Very nice idea for a thread!

I didnt know number one on the bonus facts.

Im sure a lot of people will learn from this.

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## Miracle

> How do they know that kids don't dream about themselves until age 3?
> 
> And what if someone has chronic snoring and literally snores throughout the night... is that person supposedly not dreaming the entire night then? Contradicts the "everybody dreams" bit.



I picked these up from medical news websites, they don't have an area where it explains why it is the way it is, maybe if you really want to know i can link you up to a site and you can somehow contact them for answers?

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## alwaysforward

> 6. We Only Dream of What We Know
> 
> Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts - 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? The evil killer in your latest dream may be the guy who pumped petrol in to your Dad’s car when you were just a little kid. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces through our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams



I've never heard that before, and that's an interesting idea.

Where'd you hear that?  I wonder how they could know that....

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## Mes Tarrant

> I picked these up from medical news websites, they don't have an area where it explains why it is the way it is, maybe if you really want to know i can link you up to a site and you can somehow contact them for answers?



Actually... could you?  :smiley:  That's a good idea.

I'm iffy on number 6 as well. How do they account for the "face" of some really weird monster thing?

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## innerspacecadet

I'm suspicious of #6 too.  If every face in a dream is a face you know, why don't you recognize everyone you see in your dreams as familiar IRL?  Maybe it could be because we only saw that face once or twice.  I would expect that the mind has the ability to construct "average" faces during dreams, based on real faces but not quite any *single* real face, much the way my mind constructs "average" places during dreams that are not quite any single real place but may have features of multiple real places.  

There's this test of perception where people are shown a sequence of faces, and then two faces at the end, and they're asked to say which face they remember seeing.  The face that most people claim to remember from the sequence is a face they never actually saw, but has the averaged-out features of several faces they *have* actually seen.  (I actually "passed" that test the one time I took it and educatedly-guessed that it was the non-average face that I'd seen, because the averaged face didn't seem to quite remind me of any specific face I saw, whereas I knew I saw something very much like the non-average face.)  I wouldn't be surprised if these "average" faces make up the faces of most dream characters who are not relatives or everyday sights in your real life, unless you have a photographic memory, as do some highly visual people with learning "disabilities."

I also don't quite believe #4.  Dreams are about nothing, IMO.  There is no subconscious trying to speak to you in symbols.  However, the subconscious does like to make a lot of associations, often very loose ones.  So, one thing appearing in a dream can trigger another thought or image that's barely related to it.

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## Mes Tarrant

Yeah, I also don't agree with number 4. Who are these people from the website to say that everyone's dreams are symbolic, anyway? How could you prove or disprove that in any case? One indication of a good theory is you_ must_ be able to prove it wrong.

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## Miracle

K i will see what i can do to get source questions.

On the other hand i have a question, for #1 it says everyone is paralyzed while sleeping, so what if somehow using a drug or technique or any other way to not get into this paralyzed position, and then in your dream you were able to fly, would you fly in reality? cause if you can fly in dreams and not paralized in reality you can probably fly in reality. Something to think about, and please do not say it's impossible, we must find ways!

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## ♥Mark

> K i will see what i can do to get source questions.
> 
> On the other hand i have a question, for #1 it says everyone is paralyzed while sleeping, so what if somehow using a drug or technique or any other way to not get into this paralyzed position, and then in your dream you were able to fly, would you fly in reality? cause if you can fly in dreams and not paralized in reality you can probably fly in reality. Something to think about, and please do not say it's impossible, we must find ways!



 ::doh::

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## roguext22

very nice facts.. i must agree with them all..  :smiley:

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## skysaw

> 1. When you are snoring, you are not dreaming.



I have strong evidence to the contrary on this one. On more than one occasion my wife has interrupted one of my dreams when she woke me to tell me I was snoring too loud.  :Oops:

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## gyerenfeli

I've got a few comments. About the paralysis durring dreams, what about the people who walk in their sleep? Are they not dreaming? I went to a sleep over years ago when I was a teen, and one of the girls started laughing in her sleep. We asked her why she was laughing, she told us "They said 'Sil', not 'Phil'." That tells me she had a dream when someone used the wrong name for her father, Phil. As the night went on, we had her walking all around the basement where we were sleeping. Until we got her to the stairs. She collapsed instead of going up them.

With the fact about the faces, I agree with that. I dreampt last night that I was at Wal*mart, sitting in my van in the parking lot, and next to me was a little old lady coming out with her groceries. She looked familiar enough that I waved at her, and she smiled back, but I don't know where I'd seen her before. Also, I am a person who believes in a life _before_ this life, and I think some of these faces of people in dreams _may_ be someone we know from before our birth. I may be wrong though, it's just a guess that nobody can prove.

Where I don't think that ALL dreams have any special meaning, some could be just stress relief, I have had some dreams that are still quite vivid in my mind that I can see the symbolism in them. One part of a dream I still remember from some time ago, I was lifted off thr ground by a tornado, but I fought against it, knowing I had to stay with my mother. I had a part of my life that was turbulant, for lack of a better word. This was represented by the tornado in my dream. The thing that got me through it was my love for my mother. I didn't want to dissapoint her. In the dream, my desire to stay with my mom helped me overcome the tornado, and I was put back down, safe and sound. There is a lot more symbolism in that dream, but here is not the place to go over the whole thing. I just used it for an example.

All of these dream facts are very interesting, and I can see some truth to all of them within my own dreaming experience.

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## Mes Tarrant

> K i will see what i can do to get source questions.
> 
> On the other hand i have a question, for #1 it says everyone is paralyzed while sleeping, so what if somehow using a drug or technique or any other way to not get into this paralyzed position, and then in your dream you were able to fly, would you fly in reality? cause if you can fly in dreams and not paralized in reality you can probably fly in reality. Something to think about, and please do not say it's impossible, we must find ways!



 ::doh::  is right.  :tongue2:

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## Matt5678

> 6. We Only Dream of What We Know
> 
> Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts - 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? The evil killer in your latest dream may be the guy who pumped petrol in to your Dad’s car when you were just a little kid. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces through our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams



that is one of the most fascinating dream facts i have ever heard.  :smiley: 
i knew the mind had to use memories to create dream experiences but I didn’t know it could just take a person at random from your memory. 

like the guy in my dream trying to sell me a watch was the man i walked passed in six Flags amusement park sixteen years ago.  :Eek: 

very interesting

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## Mes Tarrant

^ Way to believe everything you read!  ::chuckle:: 

Tho that particular one probably has more truth to it than others on the list.

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## Matt5678

> ^ Way to believe everything you read! 
> 
> Tho that particular one probably has more truth to it than others on the list.




yes, one of my many problems  :Oops:

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## Abra

#6 is true in some ways. In a recent lucid, I saw a tall chick with bright pink pigtails. The pigtails came from the character Presea, from Tales of Symphonia, but Presea was short... And animated. This person was tall, and looked realistic. Perhaps dream characters are a mixture of characteristics from people we see. 

I highly doubt that dream characters are replicas of real people. Our memories aren't that accurate. Details will be skewed, altered, emphasized, and ignored. It's impossible for us to see anyone true-to-life in a dream. That's one of the reasons it's a dream! I see my sister in my dreams sometimes, but never have her freckles been in the right places!

What makes me chuckle is the "people that you may not know or remember" part. That makes the whole thing as provable as the undetectable ghost sitting right next to me (you can't prove he's not there!).

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## Miracle

> is right.



Oh yeah sorry i forgot this forum is related to only dreams, DREAMS that i have about flying! Nothing is impossible though, if you heard about a story of a woman saving her husband when he was under a car, she felt as if she knew she could lift this car off of her husband and with will power and belief she did it, please be very open minded, as anything is possible.

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## Shamrox

Very interesting. Really cool.

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## Mes Tarrant

> Oh yeah sorry i forgot this forum is related to only dreams, DREAMS that i have about flying! Nothing is impossible though, if you heard about a story of a woman saving her husband when he was under a car, she felt as if she knew she could lift this car off of her husband and with will power and belief she did it, please be very open minded, as anything is possible.



I consider myself to be an open-minded person about a lot of things, and yeah I've heard all those extraordinary stories before. But please. Sleep paralysis is not what keeps us from flying in real life.  ::?:

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## FreeOne

> I consider myself to be an open-minded person about a lot of things, and yeah I've heard all those extraordinary stories before. But please. Sleep paralysis is not what keeps us from flying in real life.



yeah i agree.  I think it is called gravity that does that.

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## Shamrox

lol i believe what that means is that sleep paralysis keeps us from throwing our arm out in super man position and trying to jump through the roof. It keeps us from acting out physically. For ex: Have you ever jumped from fear in a nightmare and it woke you up because your body actually jumped?

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## gyerenfeli

> lol i believe what that means is that sleep paralysis keeps us from throwing our arm out in super man position and trying to jump through the roof. It keeps us from acting out physically. For ex: Have you ever jumped from fear in a nightmare and it woke you up because your body actually jumped?



I've had a dream that I was falling off a cliff, and just at the time I was going to hit the ground, I woke up. The bed was bouncing as though I'd just jumped or something. Does that count?

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## Shamrox

yes! Same thing. Your natural knee jerk type reaction would be to tense up or jump, so obviously that fright was enough to break through your sleep paralysis and cause you to act it out in real life.

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## Mes Tarrant

> I've had a dream that I was falling off a cliff, and just at the time I was going to hit the ground, I woke up. The bed was bouncing as though I'd just jumped or something. Does that count?



Yes it counts. I've had similar experiences with my legs flailing about. I sort of enjoy it.  :tongue2:

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## Shamrox

lol thats hilarious picturing your legs just kicking like crazy and your upper body totally still!

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## wisp

To say we dream "in full color" means nothing to me, if you don't feel anything particular about the colors in any given dream. 

Otherwise, what would you mean by saying we dream in full color? That there are areas in our brain in charge of detecting color and those are activated during REM? 

If the answer is "none of the above", then the statement makes no possible sense, i believe. 

Anyway, cool thread!

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## Shark Rider

really cool facts...i've learned so much! ::chuckle::

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## Miracle

Just wanted to bump up my old thread. Haven't been on DV for a long time. Hi again everyone  ::D:

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