Some fun facts about dreaming

Men and Women Dream Differently Researchers have found a number of differences between men and women when it comes to the content of their dreams. In one study, men reported more instances of dreaming about aggression than women did. 

According to dream researcher William Domhoff, women tend to have slightly longer dreams that feature more characters. When it comes to the characters that typically appear in dreams, men dream about other men twice as often as they do about women, while women tend to dream about both sexes equally.

REM sleep, the stage of sleep during which dreaming occurs, is characterized by paralysis of the voluntary muscles. Why? The phenomenon is known as REM atonia and prevents you from acting out your dreams while you're asleep. Basically, because motor neurons are not stimulated, your body does not move.

In some cases, this paralysis can even carry over into the waking state for as long as ten minutes, a condition known as sleep paralysis. Have you ever woken up from a terrifying dream only to find yourself unable to move? While the experience can be frightening, experts advise that it is perfectly normal and should last only a few minutes before normal muscle control returns.

Over a period of more than forty years, researcher  Calvin S. Hall collected more than 50,000 dream accounts from college students. Hall’s student William Domhoff made these reports available to the public during the 1990s. The dream accounts revealed that many emotions are experienced during dreams including joy, happiness, and fear. The most common emotion experienced in dreams was anxiety, and negative emotions in general were much more common than positive ones

While dreams are often heavily influenced by our personal experiences, researchers have found that certain themes are very common across different cultures. For example, people from all over the world frequently dream about being chased, being attacked, or falling. Other common dream experiences include school events, feeling frozen and unable to move, arriving late, flying and being naked in public.

So the next time you dream you are arriving late at your airport, while naked, remember this is a common dream, so you are not alone.