Every night your conscious mind shuts down and every morning you wake up, ready for a brand new day.
But while the conscious part of your mind shuts down, your brain
remains very much active throughout the night. Part of this brain
activity generates what can sometimes be extremely vivid and even
haunting images during the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep –
what we know as dreams and nightmares.
The average person will spend 19.3 years of their entire life in this
trance-like state we know as sleep. But even though we spend nearly 1/3
of our lives sleeping, most of us know surprisingly little about what
happens to our brains when we shut off for the night.
Below are 5 interesting facts about dreams you never knew:
Sleepwalking Underwater (Photo credit: Elena Kalis www.elenakalisphoto.com)
While
it doesn’t happen often, there have been numerous reported cases of
sleepwalkers killing people while sleepwalking. As of the year 2000,
there were 68 reported cases in the literature.
In order to be found guilty of murder in the classical Western legal system, a person has to have both a
mens rea (guilty mind) as well as an
actus reas
(guilty act), in order to be guilty. For this reason, sleepwalking has
been used successfully as a defense to homicide. In other words, because
sleepwalkers in their sleep like state cannot form the legal intent to
commit murder – the fact that they stabbed someone with a knife, shot
them in the face, or bludgeoned them with a hammer – doesn’t mean that
they’re legally guilty of murder.
Perhaps the most incredible “not guilty” verdict in a sleepwalking
homicide was the Canadian case of Kenneth Parks, who was acquitted in
1987 after:
- Getting up in the middle of the night
- Driving 14 miles to his in-laws
- Bludgeoning his mother-in-law with a tire iron
- Strangling his father-in-law
- Stabbing them both with a kitchen knife
His mother-in-law died, while his father-in-law survived, but just
barely. Parks turned up shortly after at the police station, apparently
confused.
As unbelievable as the case may be, the jury believed that Parks was
legitimately sleepwalking when the attack occurred and thus found him
not guilty. He was reportedly very close with his in-laws, and didn’t
seem to realize during the attack that he had severed the tendons in
both of his hands. His family also had a strong history of sleepwalking.
Sleep Lab (Photo credit: Nicole Mays)
For
most people, dreaming is a passive state where the impossible is
possible – it’s another reality we experience, totally separate from our
normal lives. While the images may be extremely vivid in the moment,
they quickly fade as we wake up and realize – with either great relief
or extreme disappointment – that it was “only a dream”.
Yet not all dreams are like this. Lucid dreams are dreams where you
are conscious that you’re dreaming, but your brain is still in a state
of sleep. Approximately 50% of people have experienced a lucid dream in
their life, though the amount of people who experience lucid dreams on a
regular basis is significantly lower.
For a long time, psychologists and researchers denied that true lucid
dreams were possible. They argued that if accounts of lucid dreaming
were valid, they likely occurred during moments of transition between
sleeping and waking, and certainly not during the deep REM sleep where
dreams are normally found. After all, how do you prove you’re actually
lucid while dreaming – you can’t very well shout out that you’re
dreaming during a dream; your muscles are paralyzed when you’re
sleeping, a phenomenon that prevents you from running into a wall when a
tiger is chasing you in your nightmares.
In 1978, researcher Keith Hearne of the University of Hull was the
first to scientifically confirm the lucid dreaming phenomenon by
exploiting the fact that not all of the body’s muscles are paralyzed
during sleep – during REM sleep, the eyes can still move. Could a lucid
dreamer actually move their eyes in such a way as to notify the
researchers that he/she had become conscious during a dream?
As a matter of fact, yes. A lucid dreamer in Hearne’s lab – Alan
Worsley – managed to move his eyes left and right in a pre-determined
pattern each time he became lucid. And by monitoring Worsley’s eyes with
a polygraph and watching out for the pre-determined pattern, Hearne was
able to confirm that Worsley was in fact consciously communicating
while still deep in REM sleep.
Hearne’s research revealed that the lucid dreams experienced by
Worsley tended to happen most often in the early morning, approximately
30 minutes into a REM period. The lucid dreams tended to last
approximately 2-5 minutes. Further research also found that lucid dreams
tended to occur most frequently at times of high arousal during REM
sleep.
Woman Sleeping (Photo credit: RelaxingMusic)
Surprisingly,
men and women both report the same amount of dreams with sexual
content, despite the fact that men experience sexual thoughts more
frequently in everyday life. In a study at the University of Montreal
that looked at over 3,500 dream reports, around 8% of the dream reports
from both men and women contained sexual activity. However, not
everything about dreaming is different than reality – men in the study
were twice as likely to have dreams with multiple sexual partners than
women.
Some other funny sex facts about dreams included the fact that –
while both men and women reported experiencing an orgasm in 4% of their
dreams – women were the only ones who actually dreamed about their
partners having an orgasm. 4% of women in the study reported
experiencing dreams where their partners would orgasm, but none of the
men in the study reported orgasms other than their own. Hopefully for
the ladies, this isn’t an accurate reflection of real life.
Nightmare (Photo credit: Jonas Tana)
A
study by psychologist Jennie Parker of the University of the West of
England found that women experience more nightmares than males. Women
not only reported more nightmares, but they also reported their
nightmares as more emotionally intense.
Why Do We Dream (Photo credit: Shivenis)
Ever
since humans have existed we have wondered why we dream. Some like
Sigmund Freud speculated that dreams were manifestations of our
unfulfilled and repressed desires, while others believe that dreams are
simply a side effect of our brain’s activity in REM sleep.
According to Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett, at least part of
the reason we sleep is to process the thoughts and problems that trouble
us during our waking hours. Barrett’s theory posits that the illogical
aspects of dreams and the vivid visual images we experience during our
dreams provide a way to process the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that
isn’t possible during our usual reality.
Whatever the reason for your dreams, the likely answer is that your
dreams have evolved to fulfill multiple functions. Critical thinking may
be one reason, information processing might be another. Even with the
tremendous scientific strides we’ve made in the 20th and 21st centuries,
there’s still much about sleep and dreams we really don’t know. Who
knows, maybe dreams really are a veiled window into our baser urges and
impulses, like Freud suggested.
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