1. Nightmares Help Protect Us in Real Life

Most of us have had nightmares, and while they may seem scary, there’s actually a good side to having them. Researchers have found that feeling scared in your dreams can actually help you cope better with fear during your waking hours.

Nightmares enhance our brain’s ability to deal with real-life dangers and frightening experiences. However, in terrifying and traumatic dreams, those benefits are lost, and they can actually have a negative impact after you wake up.

2. Your muscles are paralyzed during dreams

During REM sleep, (the deep sleep stage where most dreams occur), our eyes continue to move but our muscles are paralyzed. According to a study, a set of specialized cells in our brains called motor neurons stop our muscles from moving while we sleep to prevent potential injury.

3. Dreams Enhance Creativity and Problem Solving

Many people have made incredible breakthroughs in their dreams. Whether it’s a scientific idea, art, music, fiction or film, we know for a fact that dreams can be beneficial and there’s a perfectly logical reason that’s backed by science.

When we dream, our brain is in a different neurophysiological state, allowing it to become more adept at solving problems and finding solutions to things that baffle our conscious minds. And in this state, we experience higher brain activity, which makes our brains more capable of coming up with creative solutions and solving problems.

4. Not remembering what happens in your dreams

We all know how difficult it is to remember our dreams after waking up, let alone remembering older dreams from weeks, months or years ago. In fact, we forget up to 95% of our dreams, and this is because the changes in the brain that occur when we sleep do not support the information processing needed to store and form memories.

Brain scans of sleeping people show that the area that plays a key role in memory formation, found in the frontal lobe, is inactive during REM sleep.

5. Blind People Can Dream Too

People who are born blind can have visual experiences in their dreams because they have the same electrical activity in their brains as people with normal vision. However, although they have visual sensations in their dreams, they cannot describe the experience and conceptualize the sensation because they have never experienced it in their lives.

However, people who are not born blind but later go blind for some reason can experience visual dreams. Dreams are driven by memories, so people who lose their sight later in life can experience visual dreams thanks to brain circuits that were formed before they went blind.

6. You Can't Read in Your Dreams

When we read, this is when the right side of our brain is most activated, and this is exactly the part of the brain that is out of reach when we are dreaming. In fact, when we dream, the entire brain region responsible for language, reading, writing and speaking is less active.

However, there is an exception to this rule and some people can read in their dreams. However, this only applies to a small number of people - usually those who think about language and writing the most, such as writers and poets.

7. We only dream about faces we have seen in real life

Whether you actually remember them or not, you can only dream about faces you have seen in the past. Our dreams are based on real experiences, so the faces you see in your dreams are the result of your interpretation of real experiences.

8. You can control your dreams

By experiencing lucid dreams, you can become aware that you are literally dreaming and therefore control your dreams. This type of dream is related to a higher awareness of your mental state and people who have experienced lucid dreams claim that they knew they were dreaming when they woke up.

Dreaming is a very interesting activity of ours, hopefully with the 8 facts above you will have the most intuitive view and understand the meaning of your dreams.