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7 Surprising Facts About Sleep
Everyone dreams—every single
night—and yet we tend to know
so little about our dreams.
Where do they come from?
What do they mean? Can we
control them and should we tryto interpret them? We spoke to
the dream experts to bring you
nine surprising facts about
dreams. Read before snoozing.
1. Dreaming can help you
learn.
If you’re studying for a test or
trying to learn a new task, you
might consider taking a nap or
heading to bed early rather than
hovering over a textbook an hour longer. Here’s why: When the brain dreams, it helps
you learn and solve problems, say researchers at Harvard Medical School. In a study
that appeared in a recent issue of Current Biology , researchers report that dreamsare the brain’s way of processing, integrating and understanding new information. To
improve the quality of your sleep—and your brain’s ability to learn—avoid noise in the
bedroom, such as the TV, which may negatively impact the length and quality of
dreams.
2. The most common dream? Your spouse is cheating.
If you’ve ever woken up in a cold sweat after dreaming about your husband’s
extramarital escapade with your best friend, you’re not alone, says Lauri Quinn
Loewenberg, a dream expert, author and media personality. “The most commonly
reported dream is the one where your mate is cheating,” she says. Loewenberg
conducted a survey of more than 5,000 people, and found that the infidelity dream is
the nightmare that haunts most people—sometimes on a recurring basis. It rarely
has anything to do with an actual affair, she explains, but rather the common and
universal fear of being wronged or left alone.
3. You can have several—even a dozen—dreams in one night.
It’s not just one dream per night, but rather dozens of them, say experts—you just may
not remember them all. “We dream every 90 minutes throughout the night, with each
cycle of dreaming being longer than the pr evious,” explains Loewenberg. “ The first
dream of the night is about 5 minutes long and the last dream you have before
awakening can be 45 minutes to an hour long.” It is estimated that most people have
more than 100,000 dreams in a lifetime.
4. You can linger in a dream after waking.
Have you ever woken up from such a beautiful, perfect dream that you wished you
could go back to sleep to soak it all up (you know, the dream about George
Clooney?)? You can! Just lie still—don’t move a muscle—and you can remain in a
semi-dreamlike state for a few minutes. “The best way to remember your dreams is tosimply stay put when you wake up,” says Loewenberg. “Remain in the position you
woke up in, because that is the position you were dreaming in. When you move your
body, you disconnect yourself from the dream you were just in seconds ago.”
5. Even bizarre dreams can be interpreted.
8 Things You Didn’t Know About DreamsBy Sarah Jio, Woman's DayThu, Sep 02, 2010
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While it can be hard to believe that an oddball dream about your mother, a circus and
a snowstorm can have any bearing on real life, there may be symbolism and potential
meaning to be mined in every dream—you just have to look for it, says Harvard-
trained psychotherapist Jeffrey Sumber. "The meaning of our dreams oftentimes
relates to things we are needing to understand about ourselves and the world around
us,” he says. Instead of shrugging off strange dreams, think about how they make you
feel. “We t end to dismiss these dreams due to the strange components, yet it is the
feeling we have in these dreams that matters most,” he explains. “Sometimes the
circus and the snowstorm are just fillers that allow us to process the r ange of
emotions we feel about our mother and give us the necessary distraction so we can
actually experience that spectrum of emotion.”
6. Recurring dreams may be your mind’s way of telling you something.
Do you have the same nightmare over and over again? Loewenberg suggests looking
for underlying messages in recurring dreams so that you can rid yourself of them. For
example, a common recurring nightmare people have involves losing or cracking their
teeth. For t his dream, she recommends that people think about what your teeth and
your mouth represent. “To the dreaming mind, your teeth, as well as any part o f your
mouth, are symbolic of your words,” she says. “Paying attention to your teeth dreams
helps you to monitor and improve the way you communicate.”
7. You can control your dreams.
The premise of the new movie Inception is that people can take the reins of their
dreams and make them what they want them to be. But it may not just be a Hollywood
fantasy. According to the results of a new survey of 3,000 people, dream control, or“lucid dreaming” may be a real thing. In fact, 64.9 percent of participants reported
being aware they were dreaming within a dream, and 34 percent said they can
sometimes control what happens in their dreams. Taking charge of the content of
your dreams isn’t a skill everyone has, but it can be developed, says Kelly Bulkeley,
PhD, a dream researcher and visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in
Berkley, California. The technique is particularly useful for people who suffer from
recurring nightmares, he says. Dr. Bulkeley suggests giving yourself a pep talk of
sorts before you go to sleep by saying: “If I have that dream again, I’m going to try to
remember that’s it’s only a dream, and be aware of that.” When you learn to be aware
that you are dreaming—within a dream—you not only have the power to steer
yourself away from the monster and into the arms of Brad Pitt, for instance, but you
train your mind to avoid nightmares in the first place. “ Lucid dreaming enhances your
ability to learn from the dream state,” says Dr. Bulkeley.
8. You don’t have to be asleep to dream.
Turns out, you can dream at your desk at work, in the c ar, even at your kid’s soccer
game. Wakeful dreaming—not to be confused with daydreaming—is real and
somewhat easy to do, says Dr. Bulkeley; it just involves tapping into your active
imagination. The first step is to think about a r ecent dream you had (preferably a good
one!). “Find a quiet contemplative place and bring a dream that you remember back
into your waking awareness and let it unfold,” he says. “Let the d ream re-energize.”
Wakeful dreaming can be used as a relaxation tool, but Dr. Bulkeley says it can also
help your mind process a puzzling dream. “It creates a more fluid interaction between
unconscious parts of the mind and wakeful parts of the mi nd,” he says.
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ings You Didn’t Know About Dreams http://health.yahoo.net/articles/womens-health/8-things-you-didn%E2...
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