- Sweet dreams are made of this, and bad dreams are made of that.
You might fly, have a heavyweight boxing match with a crocodile, or watch all your loved ones leave you. Dreams sure can be weird.
Although everyone dreams, it’s an extremely poorly understood aspect of our lives. As such, it’s no wonder that what we do know about dreams is as strange as the dreams themselves
Here are 12 odd things about your dreams that you may not have known about.
1. You Forget Most of Your Dreams
We all have had a fantastic or funny dream we wanted to share with people, but the memory disappears as soon as we wake up. That’s the story with 99% of your dreams — you’ll never remember them.
You’re more likely to remember dreams you had in the morning, as morning dreams are much more vivid than those you have in the dead of night. You’re also likely to remember recurring dreams because your brain already has experience with them.
2. Most of Your Dreams are Unpleasant
It’s a good thing, though, that you don’t remember most dreams. That’s because they were likely bad dreams.
It’s not completely clear why this happens, but it likely has something to do with the way your brain is processing your experiences while you sleep. Additionally, sleeping can release certain hormones that can make you experience nightmares.
3. Children Have the Most Nightmares
Speaking of nightmares, young children have more of them than older kids or adults. The nightmare season starts between the ages 3-6 and starts petering out after the age of 10.
This is because children learn to experience fear around 4 — but they haven’t learned how to process it. As kids gain more life experience, they start understanding that there’s no monster under the bed and nightmares become less common (although they never disappear completely).
4. Dreams Can Predict the Future (Kind Of)
We’ve all experienced moments where we could swear we have seen the same thing happen in a dream. And that may be kind of, sort of true.
As we said, most of your dreams are bad. During sleep, your brain runs through “simulations” of events you’re expecting, and they often end up being negative scenarios. So, if the event you were expecting ends up being stressful, it may trigger a lingering memory of your brain’s “this could happen” scenarios.
5. Animals Dream as Well
People aren’t the only ones who dream. If you’ve watched your dog’s tail wag in its sleep or your cat pawing at imaginary things, you’re well aware that animals experience dreams too.
It’s impossible to say where the line of being able to dream is drawn. However, considering even lab rats experience vivid dreams, we can probably assume all mammals do.
6. Dreams are Weird by Design
Dreams are weird, and that’s by design. It’s because your prefrontal cortex shuts down when you fall asleep.
This part of the brain is responsible for organizing and sorting the stimuli coming from your senses. With it out of commission, your brain can’t keep your dreams in check, and they start going off the rails on a crazy train.
7. Dreams Can Happen Outside of REM Sleep
You might think or have learned that dreams happen during REM sleep. While it’s true that most dreams happen in this sleep phase, you can dream even during non-REM sleep.
However, REM phase dreams are the most vivid. Dreams you have outside REM sleep are likely to be sort of muddled without much detail.
8. Chili and Dairy Can Lead to Insane Dreams
What you eat before bed can affect the quality and type of your dreams. If you want to have a crazy night, eat dairy, chocolate, or something spicy for dinner.
It’s not entirely clear why our food has an effect on our dreams. It probably has something to do with your digestive system raising your body temperature, which then knocks your dreams out of whack.
9. Blind People Can See in Their Dreams
Everybody sees strange things in their dreams. Even people who can’t see.
Studies and interviews have found that even those who have been blind since birth have visual experiences in their dreams. They probably don’t see everyday things but they definitely see something.
10. You Can’t Move While Dreaming (Usually)
While you’re dreaming, you shouldn’t be able to move. Your brain has a lockdown system in place that paralyzes you as you fall asleep. Its purpose is to keep you from actually acting out all the crazy crap you get up to in your dreams.
That said, the system isn’t completely waterproof, as sleepwalkers demonstrate. It can also fail in the other direction and keep your body motionless even though you’re awake, leading to what’s known as sleep paralysis.
11. You Know the Faces in Your Dreams
All research shows that you have seen all the faces you visualize in your dreams before. Your brain seems incapable of generating a completely unknown face in your dreams.
That said, the faces don’t have to belong to your nearest and dearest. You might dream of a passerby you saw by a glance, or somebody you saw on TV. Add to that the weird, low-detail dream filter, and the face you see might as well be someone you’ve never seen.
12. No One Knows Why We Dream
Yet, possibly the oddest thing about dreaming is that nobody knows why we do it. There have been plenty of studies on the matter, but zero conclusive answers.
Some theories suggest that they’re part of the brain’s organizational process, being a side effect of your brain sorting your experiences and emotions and committing some to memory. As we mentioned briefly, your brain may also be processing “what if” simulations to prepare for the next day based on the previous one.
That said, some scientists believe dreams are just the results of your resting brain’s neurons firing randomly. In the end, we might never know.
Dreams are just one strange thing our brain does. For more bizarre brain facts, read about the ways in which your brain lies to you or the things that prove your brain is a complete idiot.