Do you remember your dreams??

For the past few days I have been spending a lot of time reading about 'Dreams'. How/Why they occur. What do they mean. How can you get rid of recurring dreams.And a lot of other interesting trivia.

Did you know that..

1.there is a kind of dreaming, where you are aware of the fact that you are dreaming. Here, dreamers are often able to exercise a certain amount of control over their dreams and their dreams appear to be much clearer in nature to them. This is called Lucid dreaming.

2.one of the explanations for Deja vu is that it is actually the memory of dreams. That when you feel like 'this has happened before sometime', it is probably because you dreamt about a similiar situation earlier.

3.we dream on an average of one or two hours every night. And we often even have 4-7 dreams in one night. (phew)

4.men tend to dream more about other men, while women dream equally about men and women. (hmmm :-))

5.little babies do not appear in their own dreams :-( until the age of 3-4. They only dream about other things/people..

6.Dreams are normally telling you something about yourselves. Your unconscious mind is trying to bring to your attention what your conscious mind is trying to ignore.If you remember only bits of your dream, those bits are probably what your unconscious mind chose to bring to your notice.Apparently one of the ideal ways of getting rid of recurring dreams/nightmares is to lucidly dream about it and face your fear in your nightmare. You should check out The Dreams foundation for more details.

7.The above site also tells you how you can improve your Dream Recall which is the ability to remember your dreams :-)

8.Another exciting thing I read about was that there is a category of sleep called the REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement Sleep) which constitutes close to 20-25% total sleep for a grown human being.REM is characterized by rapid eye movement(obviously), low muscle tone,irregular heart and breathing rates etc. It is believed that one tends to strongly remember and visualize the dreams that they had during REM sleep,after waking up. This is quite interesting, inspite of the fact that it has been proved that dreams and REM sleeps are not directly related as they are controlled by different brain mechanisms

9.Also, Most dreams(the bad ones atleast :-)), generally belong to one of the following genres. where you are being chased or attacked, falling,unprepared or late for something,stuck in slow motion,nude in public, trapped or drowning etc..

Whew, I could go on and on. Dont forget to check out the wikipedia article on Dreams.

Oh I forgot to tell you why I ventured upon this in the first place. I had this dream the other night.Now I know it was a lucid dream because I was amazed at how I was so aware of the fact that I was sleeping. I wanted to record the dream because I did not want to forget it and I even remember feeling too lazy to get up and note it down.So I kept telling myself 'Girl, you got to remember this.' And all this was while I was dreaming. I know this because I continued to dream. :-) It was quite an exciting experience.
I will tell you about that dream some other time as I cannot possibly fit it here. And do not fret, there is not a chance in the world I am going to forget that dream. It is really amazing what you can tell your unconscious mind to do. A typical example being when we are travelling (usually alone), and we remind ourselves to get up at 5:00 because the train reaches our destination then. And yes, without fail, you will open your eyes at 5:00. Try it out :P and Sweet dreams...:-)