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.
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