Everyone dreams. Those who claim they do not, merely do not recollect their dreams. Half our dreams are forgotten five minutes after the dream, and after ten minutes we do not remember ninety per cent of it. Everyone dreams a minimum of two hours to a maximum of four hours a night. We spend one third of our life sleeping, out of which a minimum of six years is spent dreaming. Dreaming is essential to our well- being because experiments have shown that not dreaming can lead to personality disorders, and you might even start seeing dreams when awake!

Even blind people dream, using senses other than sight. If they were visually impaired later in life, they might dream in visuals. You cannot dream when you are snoring, and if you are currently giving up smoking, you may be experiencing more intense dreams. None of us dreamt of ourselves till we were at least three, and we began to have nightmares by the time we were four, which were quite intense till about seven years of age, which is why children this age often get frightened at night.

A lot of us have a sense of Déjà vu when we dream, which is more frequent among women. Women dream equally of men and women, whereas, men tend to dream more about men. We can have wet dreams that do not coincide with any explicit sexual subject, most dreams have been found to go hand in hand with excitement in the dreamer’s sexual organs, probably because brain activity is much stronger when we are sleeping than when awake!

By Damyanti Ghosh