Fascinating facts about dreams

“We are made of the same stuff as dreams, and our little life ends up sleeping”
William Shakespeare

We find the research carried out around the world of dreams fascinating and disturbing. We all know that sleep is a biological need of the human being, it helps us organize memories, information…the brain is incredibly active at night reorganizing experiences and memories like the most sophisticated computer that can exist.

Meanwhile, our body rests and regains strength.
Our dreams, those complex dream rooms where inexplicable stories happen, are almost always a reflection of our worries and anxieties, our desires.…the night is almost always a world where we fall into a dimension that we do not fully understand. So what if we know some more facts about sleep today?

1. Why do some people remember their dreams and others don’t?

Surely you have a family member or friend who always surprises you by telling you their dreams. How can they remember them so vividly? It has a simple explanation. Various studies such as the one recently published in the journal “Neuropsychophamacology” tell us that approximately 40% of the population manages to remember their dreams due to a different activity in their brains.

Their sleep cycles are shorter and they usually wake up after finishing the REM phase, where dreams usually arise. That is, they usually return to consciousness after a nightmare or dream, and that makes remembering easier. If you are one of those who usually enjoy a peaceful dream from the time you go to bed until you get up, it is likely that you do not remember many of them.

2. Sleep relieves trauma or bad memories

Sleep is essential to find peace. The most curious thing is undoubtedly what a study from the University of California explains to us. While we are in the REM phase, our brain experiences changes at a chemical level. The level of norepinephrine decreases and reduces the feeling of stress and emotional pain. It is a way for the brain to process the most painful experiences. It is as if they were passed through a filter accompanied by a small dose of anesthetics.

3. Lucid dreams: the way to control dreams

It is incredible to think that there could be a way to control dreams. But it’s not magic at all. These are so-called lucid dreams. Conscious dreams happen when we realize that we are dreaming. Surely it has happened to you at some point. We are almost on the verge of waking up, but we do not fully awaken, rather we are immersed in a state of semi-wakefulness where suddenly, we can take direction and control over that vast dream world.

It happens especially at the end of a cycle, a dream ends and, in some way, we tell ourselves that everything that happened was not real…we feel like we are about to wake up but we don’t open our eyes. We do not awaken to consciousness, we simply take the threads of the dream and move it as we wish. But we have to be careful with what we want… if you long, for example, to have an erotic encounter with your favorite actress/actor, the excitement itself will end up waking you up.

4. The smell of our room influences our dreams

Until recently it was thought that by falling into the world of dreams, one completely disconnected from reality. But it seems that this is not the case… a study from the University of Dresden tells us that the fragrance that surrounds us in the room determines the content of our dreams.

The experiments they carried out were really curious: they used everything from rotten eggs, garbage and fragrances as suggestive as cinnamon or roses. The results? Fascinating. The pestilence led to nightmares and dreams full of anxiety… the most pleasant dreams occurred, of course, in those cases in which the pleasant perfume of a flower or an essence enveloped the poor subjects of the experiment.

As a curious fact: it was discovered that the smell of roses improved memory and evoked the best dreams.