5 Interesting Psychological Facts About Dreams

Dreams are a succession of sensations, emotions, ideas, and images that occur involuntarily in a person’s mind during certain stages of sleep. Dreams occur in the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep because this is when brain activity is high and most resembles that of being awake. When in REM sleep; profound rest stages are a typical time for snoring. Despite what might be expected, dreams happen only at the last REM phase of each cycle. It would appear that you don’t snore when you dream; as these conditions show up on various rest stages. There are some mattresses in the market that can help you snore less. Find more guidelines here on insidebedroom.com.

Sigmund Freud:

In the early 1900s Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis wrote about the theory of dreams and their interpretations. Freud believed that dreams are a manifestation of our deepest anxieties and desires, often relating to repressed childhood obsessions or memories. In addition, it was his belief that almost every dream topic, irrespective of its content; represented the release of sexual tension. In Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899), he developed a psychological technique whereby dreams could be interpreted; he also devised a series of guidelines to help us understand the motives and symbols that appear in our dreams.

Fact #1: Violent dreams can be a warning sign

A new study suggests that a rare sleep disorder in which people act out their dreams, sometimes with violent thrashes, kicks and screams, maybe an early sign of brain disorders; including Parkinson’s disease and dementia. In this study, researchers examined Mayo Clinic medical records to identify cases of the so-called REM sleep behavior disorder reported from 2002 to 2006 and identified 27 patients who developed the REM sleep behavior disorder at least 15 years before showing symptoms of neurodegenerative ailments.

Fact #2: Men and women dream differently

If there are differences between the physiological aspect of men and women, researchers have found that there are also some differences between men and women when it comes to the content of their dreams. There are several studies that found out that men reported dreaming about weapons significantly more often than women did; while women dreamed about references to clothing more often than men. Women tend to have slightly longer dreams that feature more characters. When it comes to the characters that typically appear in dreams, men dream about other men twice as often as they do about women, while women tend to dream about both sexes equally.

Fact #3: You can control your dreams

It is possible to control your dreams and it’s called ‘lucid dreaming’. A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you are dreaming even though you’re still asleep. Lucid dreaming is thought to be a combination state of both consciousness and REM sleep, during which you can often direct or control the dream content. According to the research of Dr Jayne Gackenbach; a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada; people who frequently play video games are more likely than non-gamers to have lucid dreams where they view themselves from outside their bodies; they also were better able to influence their dream worlds, as if controlling a video-game character.

Fact #4: Dreams help us solve puzzles

According to the theory of Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard psychologist; sleeping hours may help us solve puzzles that have plagued us during daylight hours. According to her, it’s the visual and often illogical aspects of dreams that make them perfect for out-of-the-box thinking that is necessary to solve some problems. ‘Whatever the state we’re put in; we’re still working on the same problems,’ Barrett said, adding that while dreams may have originally evolved for another purpose; they have likely been refined over time for multiple tasks, including helping the brain reboot and helping us solve problems.

Fact #5: Blind people may dream visually

Researchers have found out in a study of people who have been blind at birth that; It seemed to experience visual imagery in their dreams; they also had eye movements that correlated to visual dream recall. They have also found out that although their eye movements were fewer during REM than the sighted participants of the study; the blind participants reported the same dream sensations, including visual content.