We spend a third of our lives sleeping — and apparently a good portion of that dreaming. And yet dreams are a little-understood phenomenon. What causes dreams? Are they to be taken seriously? Discover the world that appears while we sleep.
According to scientists everyone dreams every night. Provided you are sleeping complete sleep cycles — which includes REM sleep — you are definitely dreaming. In an average night a person goes through four to five sleep cycles. This translates into one to two hours of dreaming totaling about four to seven dreams every night. In the average lifetime a person spends about six years or 2 100 days dreaming.
If that’s the case why do some people claim they never dream? Quite simply we forget most of our dreams. Dreaming happens in the same part of our brain where short-term memory is stored; five minutes after the end of a dream half of it is forgotten and after ten minutes ninety percent is lost. If you want to remember your dreams experts say that the best time to recall it is just after waking — before changing position.
A Dream World
In recent years scientists have greatly increased their understanding of dreams but they are still far from understanding why we dream. Sigmund Freud’s famous psychological theory of dreams — that they are unconscious repressed desires — has not been proven. Since Freud theorists have offered more physiological reasons for dreaming including maintaining sleep coping with stress and preserving physical health.
Neuroscientists have also discovered that brain activity during REM sleep (so-called because of the Rapid Eye Movement that we experience) is crucial for learning; dreams may help us integrate new information into our memory in a non-traumatic way.
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