Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives :)

Sleep kind of fascinates me, especially dreams. In fact, anything the human brain and its subconscious is capable of is quite incredible in my opinion. Every single morning I wake up and immediately start rattling off to Todd about all the dreams I had or was just having when I woke up. Half way through out the day, I can't remember a single one. All I know is they are crazy!! I love reading about dream analysis, theories of why we dream, and even how the dreams are created. Pretty much anything on the subject interests me.  Here are some studies I recently read about that really got me thinking.

1) You forget 90% of your dreams.Within 5 minutes of waking half of your dream is forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone.

2) In our dreams, we only see faces that we already know. Our mind is not inventing faces – in our dreams we see real faces of real people that we have seen during our life but may not know or remember. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces throughout our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams.

3) Emotions. The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. Negative emotions are more common than positive ones.

4) Animals dream too. Studies have been done on many different animals, and they all show the same brain waves during dreaming sleep as humans. Watch a dog sleeping sometime. The paws move like they are running and they make yipping sounds as if they are chasing something in a dream.

5) Body paralysis. During REM sleep the body is paralyzed by a mechanism in the brain in order to prevent the movements which occur in the dream from causing the physical body to move. However, it is possible for this mechanism to be triggered before, during, or after normal sleep while the brain awakens.