4 November: Dreams

It was on this date in 1939 that Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams was first published. Here are 10 things you might not know about dreaming.

1. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.
2. Everyone dreams. So do animals – evidence of dreaming has been observed in monkeys, Dogs, Cats, Rats, Elephants, shrews and even birds and reptiles. If you think you don't dream, it is simply because you forget them. Memories of dreams aren't reliable even if you can remember them. Within 5 minutes of waking half of your dream is forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone. That is why people who wish to analyse their dreams are advised to keep a notebook by the bed and write the dream down as soon as they wake up. Since there are rare disorders which can stop people dreaming, how can you prove whether someone didn't dream or if they completely forgot that they did?
3. 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white, although this percentage is falling among younger people – 4.4% of people under 25 have dreams in black and white. Studies from 1915 through to the 1950s maintained that the majority of dreams were in black and white, but it changed in the 1960s. Scientists have linked this to the fact that films and TV are in colour now, but to me, this begs the question of why people dreamed in black and white before there was film or TV at all. Reality is in full colour, after all.
4. Blind people don't see images in dreams, but rather experiences sounds, touch and smells. The exception is people who went blind later in life – they still see images in dreams.
5. Another fact I came across several times was that the faces we see in our dreams are never made up, but are always the faces of people we have seen. Strangers in dreams have the faces of people we saw at some point in our life but have forgotten. Again, I wonder how they can actually prove this. Talking of the people in our dreams, they vary between men and women. Men are more likely to dream about other men, while women tend to dream about both sexes equally.
6. Dreams don't tend to be sweet on the whole. Negative emotions are more common in dreams than positive ones, with anxiety being the most common. Abandonment, anger, fear, joy, and happiness are also common ones. While personal experiences colour a lot of our dreams, there are common ones which are experienced by people from all cultures. These include being chased, being attacked, falling, being unable to move, being late, flying, and being naked in public.
7. Things happening around you while you sleep can find their way into your dream. It's common to dream about sounds such as Music, a baby crying, thunder, a phone ringing or a doorbell ringing and wake up to find that sound is real.
8. Dreams occur during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep which makes up 20-25% of the total. That equates to about 90-120 minutes in an average night. During a typical lifetime, people spend an average of six years dreaming.
9. People have attached significance to their dreams throughout history. Dreams were often interpreted as messages from the gods or oracles, so people attached great importance to them. The Egyptians, for example, would try to induce dreams by going to dream sanctuaries and sleeping on special beds. They wrote down their dreams on papyrus. People with vivid and significant dreams were considered special, as were people they believed had a gift for dream interpretation, like Joseph in the Old Testament. The Greeks had a god of dreams – Morpheus.
10. The modern view on dreams is that they are a way of making sense of the environment and must have some evolutionary advantage – scientists just haven't worked out what that is. If dreams are messages, they are from our subconscious, telling us to take note of something. Dreams are heavily symbolic. If you dream about an object or concept, the message is extremely unlikely to be about that. So if you dream about death, don't panic! Inventors and writers will tell you that some of their best ideas come from dreams. Things which came about through someone being savvy enough to write down a dream as soon as they had it include the periodic table, Google, the Sewing machine, and the alternating current generator. James Watson dreamed about the double helix form of DNA.

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