22 Facts About Dreams You Never Knew

22 Facts About Dreams You Never Knew

Facts About Dreams: Dreams have fascinated humans for centuries, often leaving us with vivid images and emotions that we can barely grasp upon waking. While we all dream, the science behind them is still full of mysteries. From the bizarre to the profound, here are 22 surprising facts about dreams that reveal just how strange and intriguing our minds can be when we're asleep.

22.Facts About Dreams

Night terrors tend to happen during the transition from non-REM sleep to lighter REM sleep, sometimes making the person shout and scream and even become violent. Because they move, these dreams are classified as an arousal disorder. Kids tend to grow out of them, but maybe 2 percent of adults have regular night terrors. Thankfully, after 60, only about 1% of the population gets them.

21.Facts About Dreams

Dreams might last just five minutes, but they might also last 20 minutes. As we spend about one-third of our lives sleeping, dreaming really is a huge feature of our lives. Researchers have said on average, we will spend about six years of life dreaming if we live to old age.

20.Facts About Dreams

A scary kind of lucid dream is a false awakening. These Nightmare on Elm Street-type dreams are unforgettable. There are certain levels. One is you just think you’ve woken up, and maybe you head to the bathroom to relieve yourself. A second later, you wake up for real with a warm patch of pee in your bed. Sometimes you might get up and think damn, I’m late for work, and then wake up for real and see it's Sunday…Ah, sweet relief!

Those aren’t too scary. The other type is. In these dreams, you really think you’ve gotten up. You might walk downstairs and open the fridge, but all the time, you figure something isn’t quite right. You can’t put your finger on it, though. There’s just something ominous happening. Then someone comes out from behind a door, or you realize you don’t have a fridge in the kitchen. You wake up with a jolt.

It was a dream, but by God, it felt real. One guy said it happened to him twice, so he woke up with a jolt, told himself it was just a dream, and went downstairs again, but that was also a dream! Maybe this is what inspired the movie Inception.

19.Facts About Dreams

There is also something called pre-lucid dreams. This is just when you ask yourself the question: “Am I asleep and dreaming?”

18.Facts About Dreams

There is very little brain activity when people are in comas, but people who’ve come out of comas have explained that they dreamed. Some of them said they were stuck in long nightmares. A coma can mean many things, so it all depends on which part of the brain is damaged as to how much you’ll dream.

17.Facts About Dreams

Writing on the Psychology Today website, a woman said when she was in a coma, she lived a whole different life. She said when she woke up, “it felt like someone had pulled me violently from one world I knew to another as if I had stepped from one room to another.” She lived in a different town, with lots of stores she frequented. She had lots of friends in the town. Life just went on until she was rudely awakened and was in a hospital bed.

What’s stranger is that from then on, she’d return to this town in many of her dreams. It was like going back to see old friends she’d abandoned. That’s cool, but not as cool as this next story about a man we’ll call a pandemic hero.

16.Facts About Dreams

A guy from England possibly had the funniest new life dream ever…well, funny for us, maybe not for him. During the pandemic, he became very sick. He had cancer, and after contracting the virus, he was put on a ventilator. He wasn’t expected to live. In his coma, instead of finding a new world full of possibilities, he found himself working as a delivery guy for the Tesco supermarket. He later told the press that for 11 days, he was “forced to be a Tesco delivery driver with a really crap van.”

In his new life, which he felt was totally real, a gang in London kidnapped him. They took him to a garage with a wet floor and tortured him with a defibrillator, after which they made him deliver groceries for a living. This was an 11-day epic, which is so good you need to hear some of it in his own words. He explained, “The leader of the gang was a dwarf who kept demanding 'I want more money.' I then also started selling acid tabs…They wanted me to look after a prostitute.

My job was to protect her…She worked with other hackers to find out who Banksy was as he was trying to kill the queen. There was a big event in London next to the Thames that had two giant pyramids…There was a film showing that night next to the pyramids that had three words displayed ‘YOU ARE DEAD’”. We wonder how many acid tabs he’d taken in his life prior to the pandemic. Anyway, the good news is he returned home in much better health.

15.Facts About Dreams

Many people have lucid dream superpowers. One guy said when he turns around and runs backward, he is faster than anyone on the planet. Other people have been able to fly at will. People writing on Reddit said in their dreams, they’d harnessed fire, shapeshifted, walked through walls, breathed underwater, controlled time, and spat out laser beams. It’s a pity the Tesco worker couldn’t do those things. He could have saved himself a lot of stress.

14.Facts About Dreams

Native Americans or First Nation cultures might use what are called dreamcatchers, a web to collect bad dreams. The legend states that a spider woman once told an Ojibwe tribe grandmother, “I will spin you a web that hangs between you and the moon so that when you dream, it will snare the bad thoughts and keep them from you.” This spider woman protected the tribe, but the tribe expanded, and the spider woman couldn’t protect everyone.

That’s why the dreamcatcher was invented. It later became popular in other tribes, including the Cherokee, Lakota, and Navajo. Here’s a good example of when a dream helped someone to discover the truth.

13.Facts About Dreams

We’re sure you all know the serial killer named Ted Bundy, a nightmare of a human being. Back when he was a free man, he worked with a woman named Anne Rule, ironically, on a crisis hotline that gave advice to people on the edge. For $2 an hour, psychopath Ted helped people who were thinking about hurting themselves. He was good at it. He was also smart and friendly, so Anne Rule became close friends with him. He told her his deepest secrets, and she told him hers.

So, when he was charged with horrific crimes against women, despite the evidence stacking up against him, she couldn’t believe he was guilty…until she had a dream. On April 1, 1976, after she’d just visited Ted in prison, she dreamed of a car accident in which a baby was severely hurt. She picked it up and swaddled it in her arms, screaming at bystanders that the baby needed help. They all turned away. Even an ambulance crew, nurses, and doctors refused to help, as she was screaming, “It’s going to die if you don’t help!”

In her book about Ted, she wrote, “And then I looked down at it. It wasn’t an innocent baby but a demon. Even as I held it, it sunk its teeth into my hand and bit me.” When she awoke, she understood that the baby was Ted. She’d been fooling herself about his innocence. The dream was so powerful that she changed her mind about him. That’s one of the great things about dreams. They can bring us closer to a truth hidden deep in the subconscious.

12.Facts About Dreams

The venerated American President Abraham Lincoln would have agreed. He believed in the power of dreams, and he let it be known. Back in his day, many people took dreams seriously. On April 11, 1865, Lincoln was feeling downcast.

He turned to his friend and bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, and explained why. He said he’d just had a dream where he saw a corpse lying atop a catafalque in the White House’s East Room. He said, “the subdued sobs of mourners” filled his ears. He then asked a soldier who was in the coffin, and the soldier replied, “The President. He was killed by an assassin.” A few days later, while watching the play “Our American Cousin,” at Ford’s theater, Lincoln was shot by an assassin. He died the next day.

11.Facts About Dreams

In those days, the dreams of famous people were published in newspapers. It was believed that dreams could tell us about the future, especially recurring dreams. According to the Sleep Foundation, between 60% and 75% of American adults have recurring dreams. 77% of those recurring dreams are negative.

10.Facts About Dreams

Before Dr. James Watson came up with the double helix structure of DNA, he had dreams about a double-sided staircase or, according to other accounts, intertwined serpents. The guy that created the modern periodic table in the 19th century, Dimitry Mendeleev, talked about dream inspiration, saying, “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.”

In 1816, a teenager named Mary Shelly was visiting the poet Lord Byron in Geneva when she dreamed of “a hideous phantasm of a man, stretched out, and then, on working of some powerful machine, show signs of life.” She then got to work on her novel Frankenstein. James Cameron said he had a fever and dreamed of an “image of a chrome-like skeleton emerging from a fire,” which he said had “a metallic torso holding kitchen knives.” That’s where the idea for The Terminator came from. But can dreams become dangerous?

9.Facts About Dreams

You’ll be pleased to know that dreams can’t kill you, never mind how scary they get. You can die in your dream, just as Lincoln was dead in his. You can be killed in a dream though, which, again, is likely related to fears in your waking life. Still, dreams won’t kill you.

8.Facts About Dreams

That’s not what you might have heard, though. In the 1980s, after the US had bombed the hell out of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, a lot people from those countries went to live in the US – many carrying extreme trauma from all the chaos they’d seen. Then something strange happened. About 100 young Hmong men just died in their sleep. Physicians said there didn’t seem to be an underlying cause.

The men had gone to bed healthy and didn’t wake up. Scientists gave it a name: Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome, or SUNDS. It should be noted that this part of the world is super superstitious when it comes to spirits and ghosts. So, when all those Hmomg guys, many in their early 30s, just started kicking the bucket, people believed it might be related to spirits. Many of the Hmong said these men had been visited by a spirit that sits on the chest, which you know is called sleep paralysis in the West.

The Hmong call this malign ghost dab tsuam (dah chua). So, the question for US scientists was related to if there was a connection between sleep paralysis and SUNDS. Meanwhile, Hmong men were scared out of their wits, not knowing if the evil spirit woman was going to get them in their sleep. US scientists didn’t think there were any ghost-related deaths.

They said that in the Green-Hmong subgroup, there were many cases of sudden death and also non-fatal sleep disturbances. They said Hmong men were predisposed to a type of genetic heart arrhythmia that can get worse at night when the heart is beating slowly. One doctor later said that heart arrhythmia and sleep paralysis are connected. Hmong people were told rather than placate the spirits with offerings, they should see a doctor.

7.Facts About Dreams

Despite what you might have heard, you can turn lights on or off in dreams. Not being able to turn one on might just mean you are insecure about something. Turning one on could be positive; possibly you feel good news is on the way, or you’ve had a breakthrough in work or life.

6.Facts About Dreams

50% of all your night’s dreams will usually happen during the last two hours of sleep. These are the witching hours and the time you really want control of your dreams.

5.Facts About Dreams

According to dream researchers, lucid dreaming can be learned. They say that one trick is to purposefully wake yourself up about two hours before you intend to get up fully. This is called the wake-up-back-to-bed (WBTB) technique, which can be used with the mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD) technique. The latter means saying something over and over in your head for about five minutes before you go back to sleep for another two hours.

This could be the phrase, “Next time I’m dreaming, I will remember I’m dreaming.” If you think this sounds like hogwash, scientists in 2020 put it to the test. Not only did 18% of people have a lucid dream on nights when they used the techniques, but five out of ten people who’d never had a lucid dream in their lives had at least one lucid dream in the five-week period they practiced the techniques.

4.Facts About Dreams

Sleepwalking, otherwise known as somnambulism, happens during the Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) stage of sleep. It happens to kids more, but in general, about 7 percent of people will sleepwalk at some point in their lives.

3.Facts About Dreams

There is also sleep-talking, otherwise known as somniloquy. It’s thought this often happens during REM sleep and also during light sleep. It’s usually pretty harmless. In fact, one study showed about half of all kids between 3 and 10 talk in their sleep, often just a blast of speech that lasts about 30 seconds. Adults tend to do it less; maybe only about 5% of adults regularly sleep talk. 66% of people of adults have done it at least once, according to Sleep Medicine Research, and 17% of adults had done it for a three-month or more period.

What comes out is often nonsensical or incoherent. What’s quite amusing is that the Sleep Foundation said people often get really rude and offensive when they talk in their sleep or perhaps say embarrassing sexual stuff. Studies have shown that “no” is often a word of choice for sleepers, and in a French study, the curse word “putain” was said a lot. It’s really only a problem when it turns into screaming and shouting, which happens during those night terrors we’ve already discussed. People with PTSD are more likely to talk or shout in their sleep than people that don’t have PTSD.

2.Facts About Dreams

There is also a nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder (NSRED). This means people sleepwalk to the fridge or another food source. Studies have shown that they will often eat anything, so ice cream with a pizza covered in custard and curry is just fine. One study said, “Injuries resulted from the careless cutting of food or opening of cans; consumption of scalding fluids (coffee) or solids (hot oatmeal); and frenzied running into walls, kitchen counters, and furniture.” Even worse, people have eaten toxic substances, including cleaning agents and glue.

Thankfully, this is very rare. NSRED happens to only 1 to 5 percent of adults. It’s usually connected to other sleep disorders, eating disorders, and may be related to major depression and severe anxiety. It can also be embarrassing since people and families wake up to find what looks like a family of bears have been through the kitchen in the night. One guy said he did it all the time, explaining that every other night he’ll “wake up in a bed filled with food, a Hansel-esque trail of crumbs littering my bedroom and kitchen floors.” Ok, last one, the weirdest one, even after what you’ve just heard.

1.Facts About Dreams

If you see someone sleepwalking, don’t shock them with a slap or shout at them. Be gentle. Lead them back to bed. The reason is they might do something dangerous. They could hurt you or hurt themselves. In 2005, a 15-year-old girl climbed 130 feet to the top of a crane near her house outside London, UK. When firemen got to her, they discovered she was fast asleep. She had no idea she’d walked out of her house and climbed that crane – an incredibly risky adventure.

Also, in 2005, the British press talked about a man that had just been cleared of killing his 83-year-old father. The old man had been kicked and punched and jumped on, giving him 90 injuries. When the son woke up, his father was in the house driveway looking like he’d gone 12 rounds with an escaped Chimpanzee on Xanax. The son was later subjected to what was called “the most detailed scientific tests in British legal history,” and he got off, even though he had a history of violence.

Scott Falater in the US was not so lucky after, in the 1990s, he claimed he was sleepwalking when he stabbed his wife dozens of times and dumped her body in a swimming pool. In 2021, still in prison for murder, Falater said, “All I can say is I do not know what happened. I do know for sure I never planned it.

There was nothing for me to gain from it.” In Spain in 2001, a man who murdered his wife and mother-in-law with an axe said he was dreaming about fighting ostriches when he was chopping the two women up. This excuse didn’t work in the courts, but surprisingly, the so-called sleepwalking defense has worked a few times throughout modern history.you can read more about it here. you can watch more this regard: