Amazing Facts About Sleep

First off when you enter REM sleep you are paralyzed. Most people don't know that.

The reason is, the brain is actually testing hypothetical scenarios that we may have to deal with in the future. It is actually sending signals to different muscles and creating muscle memory during REM sleep.

If the brain didn't paralyze your body during sleep you would be off walking around, mumbling incoherently, and possible urinating on the stove. OK maybe not exactly that, but there have been incidents where similar things have happened.

The important thing to recognize here is that REM sleep is going to create muscle memory. The other thing to realize is that REM dreams can be about things that have never happened.

Though they can't take you somewhere you have never seen you can only dream of what you know. Sometimes the brain creates what seem to be fantastic dreams of impossible places, but really you are just combining and mixing things from your life and imagination.

The positive side to this, is even though you can't transcend different lives in dreams, you can develop and benefit your life in any way you want. 90 percent of your dreams won't be remembered, this is because most dreams are going to be uncomfortable.

REM dreams center around the amygdala in the brain. This portion of the brain houses bad and negative emotions usually associated with fight or flight.

Nightmares are really just test simulations so your brain can develop plans and strategies in case of specific situations. Since we can only dream of things we know, most people will dream about mundane every life activities, like coming to work late and getting fired.

Then they will wake up in a cold sweat, look at the clock, and hurry to work a little early just for good measure. Kids have dreams of monsters and boogie men, coming after them in the night.

Scientists believe these dreams have been inherently passed through generations of ancestors to keep kids safe from wild beasts. It isn't until people get a bit older and mature that their dreams start having plausible plots, like losing a wallet.

They say without proper sleep and dreams, there would be no mental development. In a study done among students where researchers would wake the student every time they were about to enter dream state: within three days the subjects started noticing severe effects of lack of concentration, psychosis and even hallucinations.

Proper sleep can play a huge part on dreaming. If your bed is not soft enough or comfortable enough, you may not be relaxed enough to dream properly.

Scientists speculate that we can actually consciously use our dreams to our advantage, by meditating before sleep. The idea is if you think about what you want to dream about you can direct your dream.