Care For Your Sleep

It is possible to talk for hours about why we like sleeping and what is a good sleep like. Below, there are a number of interesting facts and information about our sleep.

• Statistics says that the Spaniards usually sleep 40 minutes less than other European nations do, and the French sleep the longer: up to 9 hours a day.
• An average person spends up to 26 years of his/her life sleeping.
• The older we become, the less time we need for restful sleeping.
• All people without exception see dreams while they sleep. Some people just can not remember their dreams sometimes.
• Not every person can see colorful dreams. The experts say that only 80% of people can see colorful dreams, and the rest 20% see the dreams in black and white.
• Blind people also can see dreams.
• Dreams can sometimes help to foresee coming diseases. For example, if a person sees in his/her dream that his/her throat is damaged or injured, it can be understood as a sign of a coming flu or cold.
• While we snore we do not see dreams.
• 20% of traffic accidents happen due to sleep deprivation or related problems.
• There is a type of phobia called somniphobia, when people are afraid of falling asleep.
• According to a recent study, those who sleep 6-7 hours a day have lower risks of premature death than those who sleep more than 8 hours a day.
• According to the Guinness World Record book, the longest period without sleep was 18 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes.

What was your most pleasant dream ever? You were Agent Smith fighting with Neo, or you were acting like James Bond trying to save the girl you love from bad guys. No, no, no: you were in the bedroom with Paris Hilton or you were playing bass for Avril Lavigne. Now, what was your most disturbing dream ever? By the way, did you know that there is a special Dreambank, created by the specialists of the University of California more than a hundred years ago? You can give those guys a call and tell them what kind of interesting dream you saw tonight. This valuable information gives Dreambank specialists a great opportunity to analyze and study our dreams in order to have a better idea about the nature and function of the dreams.

Sometimes, the findings of such researchers are quite remarkable. For example, Dr. Patricia Garfield, an expert and former president of the Association for the Study of Dreams, found out that there are only 12 universal dream patterns that we all basically see at night. The most popular dreams are the ones about chasing or being chased. Dreams about being trapped or getting lost hold the second place. A lot of people also regularly see dreams about falling down and those ones, where a person feels ashamed for his/her clothes. Finally, dreams about being injured also hold a ranking place.

Another interesting discovery was presented by a group of Canadian and Finnish specialists who found out that our dreams are actually perfect training exercises for our minds. Dreams as a phenomenon emerged on early stages of the development of human race and were considered to be a perfect psychological exercise that could help people to learn how to react on various dangerous or threatening situations. “A dream-production mechanism that tends to select threatening waking events and simulate them over and over again would have been valuable for the development of threat-avoiding skills,” says a Finnish scientist and psychologist Dr. Antti Revonsuo.

In addition to all those exciting findings, presented recently on a conference in Boston, experts argue that the fantasies that our brain generates at night depend on our personality type to a great extent. In particular, calm and conservative people tend to see dreams about being chased or falling down. Moreover, specialists underline that the content of our dreams depends a lot on what we see in the news, what we read during the day or what we worry about. This hypothesis was proposed quite long ago by the experts from Tufts University, and in the beginning of the 21st century new evidence for this thoery has come to light. Many people reported that their dreams have changed after the events of 9/11. Therefore, new fears and new worries can affect our dreams and make our sleep less calm and restful.