Dreaming- does it touch everybody?

A word dream describes a subconscious experience of various sensations that include sounds, images, emotions etc. that appear during sleep, especially REM sleep. I would like to mention a few questions related to dreaming in this article- who dreams and what does affectthe amount of dreams we remember.

Firstly, the question :" Does everyone dream?" occurs. The answer to it is :"Yes". We even dream in the womb. Besides, the length of dreaming varies over our lifetime. As a newborn infant we dream about 80% of our sleep time ( 80% of sleep in the REM state ), later this number shifts- as adults we have 20-25 % of our sleep in REM state and lastly, the amount of REM sleep to old people is 20%. In order to understand it better I will give you an example- if we ( adults ) sleep 8 hours , we dream for an hour and a half each night. For older people, if they sleep 8 hours, dreams take a bit more than an hour. So everybody dreams, just different amount of time. But actually there exist some very rare exceptions - people can loose ability to dream if the area of the brain that controls dreaming is injured.

So as we know that everybody dreams ( without rare exceptions ) , another question emerges to the surface - why do we remember so few of our dreams ? The answer is quite simple- we remember just what was very intense and powerful. Otherwise there isn't impact that makes us to pay attention. Much of our dreams consist of simple daily experience, for example- what we have been doing at work, which is not very terrible nor very great and we don't pay attention to it which leads to the fact that we don't remember our dream. Another factor for remembering dreams is how we wake up. If we wake up from dream naturally, this dream is usually very fresh and recent, usually more dramatic than other dreams ( we dream few times during night ) so we remember it. But as for nowaday society, we tend not to listen to our natural body rythms and we wake up from either the noise of alarm clock, or screaming baby or other factors. In this case we disturb natural rythms and disturb dream, which means we don't remember it.

To sum up, dreams are known to everyone. But some of us remember more of them, some less. That is connected not just with intensity of our dreams ( whether dreams are captivating or not ), but also the quality of our sleep. By listening to natural rythms of our body, we will have a better sleep and will remember the subconscious experience of our sleep time.


References:

http://www.balancedlivingmag.com/images/2005/July-August%2005/dreaming_TOC.jpg