What Are Your Dreams Telling You?

Dreams are symbolic

You forget half of your dream within 5 minutes of waking up. After 10 minutes, you forget 90%. If you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language. Whatever symbol your dream picks on, it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself. Our mind interprets the external stimuli that our senses are bombarded with when we are asleep and make them a part of our dreams. This means that sometimes in our dreams we hear a sound from reality and incorporate it in a way. For example you may be dreaming that you are in a concert while your brother is playing a guitar during your sleep.

Men and Women dream differently – Who knew, right?

Men tend to dream more about other men. Around 70% of the characters in a man’s dream are other men. On the other hand, a woman’s dream contains almost an equal number of men and women. Aside from that, men generally have more aggressive emotions in their dreams than the female lot.

In our dreams, we only see faces that we already know

Our mind is not inventing faces – in our dreams we see real faces of real people that we have seen during our life but may not know or remember. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces throughout our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams. The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. Negative emotions are more common than positive ones.

Not everyone dreams in color

A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. Studies from 1915 through to the 1950s maintained that the majority of dreams were in black and white, but these results began to change in the 1960s. Today only 4.4% of the dreams of under-25 year-olds are in black and white. Recent research has suggested that those changing results may be linked to the switch from black-and-white film and TV to color media.

When you dream, your body is paralyzed

In the first 90 minutes of sleep, you go through deepening stages ranging from light sleep to deep sleep.

Then you enter a phase called REM sleep (REM is short for Rapid Eye Movement) During REM sleep, the rest of your body essentially becomes paralyzed. The release of certain neurotransmitters shut down and your large muscles do not move.

Some people have abnormal REM sleep in which those neurotransmitters do not shut down, and they act out their dreams. Most of the dreams we vividly remember happen during REM, as our brain has higher activity during this phase.

Maybe the next time you wake up and remember a vivid dream, write it down and try to decipher what the hidden meaning held within could be!