sciencedreams

The Science of Dreams

What is REM sleep?

Rapid Eye Movement (REM) is simply moving your eyes when you dream. That's it! You just have to be dreaming, and your mind is active. Scientists have formulated many statistics about how much you dream by research with Rapid Eye Movement. (Just so you know, you only have REM sleep when you dream.)

Who discovered REM sleep?
Nathaniel Kleitman and his team of scientists discovered REM sleep in 1953. They discovered it by connecting people to brain wave sensing devices with muscle tone and eye movement sensors and collecting data from there, forming the theory of REM sleep, which today is a fact.

How often do we dream?
According to REM research and other studies, we dream about 5 times a night, which equals about six hours of total dream time a night. Over a lifetime, according to these statistics, we dream about 136,00 times in a lifetime.

Scientifically Speaking...
You cannot usually control your dreaming, not by the foods you eat or anything else. Dreaming is caused by by biological steps your body takes to dream. They are:

1. Large brain cells in brain stem spontaneously come out about every hour and a half.

2. They send random stimuli to parts of the brain.

3. The stimuli stimulate places of the brain like muscle control, sensory, memory and other areas.

4. The brain tries to make sense of the random information, turning it into a dream.

Is there a reason for dreaming?
This a very controversial subject. According to psychotherapists, the "topdown" theory works. That means that they think that dreams have a reason, an intentional reason, from the unconscious.

Neurologists believe in the "bottom-up" theory. They believe that dreams have no real meaning.

Between these theories is a theory called content analysis. Content analysis simply describes and classifies the representations in dreams such as colors, cars, and people. However, these have no real interpretational meaning.

There are differences between male and female dreamers, although these differences are unexplained.