25 Things You Didn't Know About Dreams - mental_floss List Show Ep. 321 | Mental Floss

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube

And did you know that video games might be good practice for lucid dreaming

According to studies conducted by Jane Gachenbach, a psychologist at Grant McEwen University in Canada

gamers spend so much time practicing virtual reality that they're more likely to be able to control actions in their dreams

Plus, in a study she did in 2008 with about a hundred participants, she found that gamers were less prone to nightmares

because they were more willing to fight back during their scary dreams

And that's the first of many facts about dreams that I'm going to share with you today in this video brought to you by Geico

It's worth noting before we start that scientists still don't know that much about dreams, so these are just some things that have been studied and observed

Alright, let's get to it. According to a 1966 study in which people reported on their dreams, dreams are primarily visual and auditory

Smell and taste sensations occur less than 1% of the time. But interestingly, a 2009 study from the European Sleep Research Society found that presenting smells to a sleeping person could affect their dreams

Positive smells like roses produced positive dreams, and negative smells like rotten eggs gave more negative dreams

In the average lifetime, a person will have over 100,000 dreams. That might include dozens of dreams in a single night, but we only spend about two hours each night dreaming

50% of people report having had a recent precognitive dream, or a dream that seems to tell the future

but most experts believe that this phenomenon is due to the law of large numbers

Basically, tons of stuff happens every single day, so it's very probable that every once

in a while, something that happens will have been recently dreamt about

A famous precognitive dream happened to Abraham Lincoln a few days before he was assassinated According to his friend Ward Hill Layman Lincoln told a small group that he dreamed of a group of soldiers And he asked the group who died And a soldier responded the president He was killed by an assassin

But whether Lehman was telling the truth, well, that's for you to decide

Also, how often did Lincoln probably dream about getting assassinated? He was under constant threat of assassination

I shouldn't make jokes about your assassination, Abe Lincoln. You're my favorite bobblehead on the entire wall

Another famous dreamer was Dmitri Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table, who claimed that the idea came from a dream

He said, I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required

Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary

I have dreams for my books like that all the time, and then I wake up, and I write down exactly what the dream told me to write down

and then I read it, like, four hours later when I'm, like, properly awake, and it's awful

People tend to remember more negative emotions than positive ones in dreams. This phenomenon was observed by researcher Calvin S. Hall, who monitored dream accounts

for more than 50,000 college students over the course of 40 years

The most commonly reported feeling from dreams? Anxiety. I wasn't aware that you could feel something else from a dream

According to a 1996 study conducted by William Domhoff, children between the ages of 9 and

11 only recall about 20 to 30% of their dreams. Adults, on the other hand, have a recall rate around 79%

But according to dream researcher J. Allen Hobson, we forget about 95% of our dreams

So this is definitely something that needs to be researched more. As does so much of sleep science, generally the field of like dream studies sometimes

suffers from a lack of intellectual rigor. Humans dream during both REM sleep and non-REM sleep, but babies are the champions of REM

sleep, spending over half their sleep time in REM. Now we don know if they really dreaming all that time but adults only spend about 20 to 25 percent of their sleep time in REM but we dream at least four to six times per night And although we think of them as little imagination factories in fact children have fairly realistic dreams

According to one study, about 29 percent of their dreams are realistic, around 47 percent are realistic fiction, and only 4 percent are purely fantastic

Those are comparable with adult dreams. Now, is it realistic, realistic fiction, or purely fantastical when I dream that I am a banana on the space shuttle

Because, I mean, I think there are bananas on the space shuttle, but I'm unlikely to become one of them

Anyway, many people have reported that wearing a nicotine patch intensifies their dreams

A lot of people wonder how blind people dream. Experts have observed that if a person was born blind or went blind at a young age

they typically only dream in smell, sound, taste, and touch. Not in sight, but those who went blind later in life often do have visual dreams

There's something known as hypnagogia or awakeful dream. This is when someone transitioning from being awake to being asleep dreams

So during that time, people technically dream while they're awake, which could mean anything from experiencing weird visuals and sounds to hallucination

The Hawaiian word for dream translates to soul sleep. This is because ancient Hawaiians believed that people were able to communicate with ancestors and gods while they slept

Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians also considered dreams to be very important. Both societies had dream interpreters who would tell the future based on a person's dreams

And in fact, the Chester Beatty Papyri are the manuscripts that contain the earliest known dream dictionary

and it was written over 3,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt. According to a 1996 study, between 60 and 75 percent of adults have recurring dreams

and women are more likely to have them than men. It might not feel like it, but we dream in real time

According to Dr. Reuben Naimon, a psychologist who studies sleep at the University of Arizona

dreams can last anywhere from a couple minutes to an hour. Mammals and birds have REM sleep so they probably dream but reptiles probably don But if reptiles don dream does Medusa dream That presumably what she and the Flash are talking about According to a 2007 study conducted at the University of Montreal new mothers are more

likely to have nightmares than pregnant women or women with no children

In fact, three-quarters of women who recently gave birth had nightmares about bad things

that might happen to their babies. When awakened while dreaming, people tend to report that their dreams contained vivid

color 70% of the time and vague color 13% of the time, but outside of scientific studies

only 25-29% of people say that they dream in color. So many of us do dream in color, but don't properly remember

Interestingly, childhood exposure to black and white television affects whether people dream in color. A 2008 study revealed that people who are 25 years old or younger rarely

report dreaming in black and white. People who are older than 55, though, say that they

dream in black and white fairly often. These findings were reversed in studies done in the 40s

College students claimed they rarely dreamt in color. So scientists think that TV might be involved

And finally, I return to my salon to tell you that men dream about men more than women

dream about men. According to studies, 66% of the characters in men's dreams are male, whereas the ratio

of male to female characters in women's dreams is 50-50. And this phenomenon is true across all cultures that have been observed, so maybe it just