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  • It's kind of nuts that you go to sleep each night with no clue what you're going to experience in your dreams.

  • You could fly, talk to ghosts, or end up back in high school with a big exam coming up.

  • Dreams are so strange and mysterious that scientists have been exploring them for ages, and some of the facts they've uncovered are even weirder than the ones you already know.

  • Blind nightmares.

  • Blind people have a mixed bag when it comes to their dreams.

  • According to National Geographic, researchers asked 50 people, half of whom were blind, to record their dreams for four weeks in a Danish study.

  • On one hand, many previously sighted blind people can see again in their dreams.

  • On the other hand, blind people have more nightmares.

  • While only 7 percent of the sighted participants reported nightmares, 25 percent of the blind ones did.

  • Their nightmares included things like losing their guide dogs or being hit by cars.

  • The researchers guessed that nightmares could be a form of "rehearsal" for real life and that blind people need more rehearsal because they experience more danger on a daily basis.

  • Dream Control.

  • Research has shown that you can actually learn to control your dreams.

  • According to Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard-based sleep researcher, if you want to stimulate a dream in which you solve a problem, think about it before you go to sleep and try to create an image of the problem in your mind.

  • It's even better if you can use an actual visual.

  • For example, if you're trying to write a song, put your guitar next to your bed.

  • Or if you want to solve a problem involving a certain person in your dream, look at a photo of them before you go to sleep.

  • "Sometimes dreams make breakthroughs, and there are a lot of anecdotes about famous examples of major creativity or major scientific problem solving."

  • Not only can you control what you dream about, you can also control what you do in your dreams, in a trippy process called lucid dreaming.

  • There are a bunch of different ways to induce lucid dreams, one of which is called reality testing, according to a researcher from Stanford.

  • Part of reality testing is asking yourself throughout the day if you're dreaming, and then looking for clues that you're awake.

  • Looking for clues while you're awake today will help you become aware that you're dreaming tonight.

  • Helping you learn.

  • Do you ever indulge yourself and take a nap in the middle of the day?

  • If so, you now have a good excuse for dozing off at your desk.

  • Dreaming actually helps you learn.

  • In a study by researchers from Harvard Medical School, 99 participants played a video game in which they navigated through a virtual maze.

  • Afterward, half of them napped for two hours, while the other participants stayed awake.

  • Then they all did the maze again.

  • The participants who reported dreaming about the maze improved their performance over six times more than the people who didn't sleep or who didn't dream about the maze.

  • Acting out dreams.

  • Did you know that your muscles nearly become paralyzed when you sleep so you don't act out your dreams?

  • If that freaks you out, try this on for size: people whose muscles don't stop them from acting out their dreams are far more likely to develop neurological disorders like dementia and Parkinson's later in life.

  • In a rare condition called REM behavior disorder, people carry out the actions from their dreams while they're still asleep.

  • Take, for example, Mike Birbiglia, a comedian who writes about living with the disorder, who dreamed that a missile was headed for his hotel room.

  • He jumped out his second-floor hotel room window, both in the dream and in real life.

  • According to Time magazine, researchers at the University of Montreal studied almost 100 adults who had been diagnosed with REM behavior disorder.

  • They found that people with the disorder are 18 percent more likely to develop a neurodegenerative disease five years after their diagnosis.

  • Babies don't dream.

  • Have you ever looked at an adorable baby sleeping and wondered what they were dreaming about?

  • It turns out, they don't dream at all.

  • David Foulkes, author of Children's Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness, believes that babies spend their REM sleep building pathways in their brains and later developing language skills.

  • With all this brain development going on, there wouldn't be much brain-power left to also create dreams.

  • Children don't actually dream until they're 4 or 5 years old, when they develop the capacity to visualize imaginary things.

  • Even then, the dreams they report lack characters, memories, and emotions.

  • It's not until they're 7 or 8 and they have a sense of identity that kids' dreams start to include plot lines.

  • The stronger their self-concept is, the more vivid and structured their dreams become.

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It's kind of nuts that you go to sleep each night with no clue what you're going to experience in your dreams.

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