10 Things WE Didn't Know About DREAMS.

1. Blind People Dream

Who become blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion. It is hard for a seeing person to imagine, but the body need for sleep is so strong that it is able to handle virtually all physical situations to make it happen.

2. You Forget 90% of your Dreams

Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream if forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone. The famous poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, woke one morning having had a fantastic dream (likely opium induced) - he put pen to paper and began to describe his vision in a dream in what has become one of English most famous poems: Kubla Khan. Part way through (54 lines in fact) he was interrupted by a Person from Porlock. Coleridge returned to his poem but could not remember the rest of his dream. The poem was never completed.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea

Curiously, Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the story of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde whilst he was dreaming.

3. Everybody Dreams

Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder) but men and women have different dreams and different physical reactions. Men tend to dream more about other men, while women tend to dream equally about men and women. In addition, both men and women experience sexually related physical reactions to their dreams regardless of whether the dream is sexual in nature; males experience erections and females experience increased vaginal blood flow.

4. Dreams Prevent Psychosis

In a recent sleep study, students who were awakened at the beginning of each dream, but still allowed their 8 hours of sleep, all experienced difficulty in concentration, irritability, hallucinations, and signs of psychosis after only 3 days. When finally allowed their REM sleep the student’s brains made up for lost time by greatly increasing the percentage of sleep spent in the REM stage

5. We Only Dream of What We Know

Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts - did you know that your mind is not inventing those faces - they are real faces of real people that you have seen during your life but may not know or remember? The evil killer in your latest dream may be the guy who pumped petrol in to your Dad car when you were just a little kid. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces through our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams.

6. Not Everyone Dreams in Color

A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. People also tend to have common themes in dreams, which are situations relating to school, being chased, running slowly/in place, sexual experiences, falling, arriving too late, a person now alive being dead, teeth falling out, flying, failing an examination, or a car accident. It is unknown whether the impact of a dream relating to violence or death is more emotionally charged for a person who dreams in color than one who dreams in black and white

7. Dreams are not about what they are about

If you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language. The unconscious mind tries to compare your dream to something else, which is similar. Its like writing a poem and saying that a group of ants were like machines that never stop. But you would never compare something to itself, for example: That beautiful sunset was like a beautiful sunset. So whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself.

8. Quitters have more vivid dreams

People who have smoked cigarettes for a long time who stop, have reported much more vivid dreams than they would normally experience. Additionally, according to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology: Among 293 smokers abstinent for between 1 and 4 weeks, 33% reported having at least 1 dream about smoking. In most dreams, subjects caught themselves smoking and felt strong negative emotions, such as panic and guilt. Dreams about smoking were the result of tobacco withdrawal, as 97% of subjects did not have them while smoking, and their occurrence was significantly related to the duration of abstinence. They were rated as more vivid than the usual dreams and were as common as most major tobacco withdrawal symptoms.

9. External Stimuli Invade our Dreams

This is called Dream Incorporation and it is the experience that most of us have had where a sound from reality is heard in our dream and incorporated in some way. A similar (though less external) example would be when you are physically thirsty and your mind incorporates that feeling in to your dream. My own experience of this includes repeatedly drinking a large glass of water in the dream which satisfies me, only to find the thirst returning shortly after - this thirst¦ drink¦ thirst¦ loop often recurs until I wake up and have a real drink. The famous painting above (Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening) by Salvador Dali, depicts this concept.

10. You are paralyzed while you sleep

Believe it or not, your body is virtually paralyzed during your sleep - most likely to prevent your body from acting out aspects of your dreams. According to the Wikipedia article on dreaming, Glands begin to secrete a hormone that helps induce sleep and neurons send signals to the spinal cord which cause the body to relax and later become essentially paralyzed.

Human Body Facts

The average human brain has about 100 billion nerve cells.

Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles (274 km) per hour.

The thyroid cartilage is more commonly known as the adams apple.

The only jointless bone in your body is the hyoid bone in your throat

It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

Your stomach needs to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it would digest itself.

It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.

The average life of a taste bud is 10 days.

The average cough comes out of your mouth at 60 miles (96.5 km) per hour.

Relative to size, the strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.

Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.

When you sneeze, all your bodily functions stop even your heart.

Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.

Children grow faster in the springtime.

It takes the stomach an hour to break down cow milk.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people do.

There are 10 human body parts that are only 3 letters long (eye hip arm leg ear toe jaw rib lip gum).

If you go blind in one eye you only lose about one fifth of your vision but all your sense of depth.

The average human head weighs about 8 pounds.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivalent of 5 times around the equator.

An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.

The length of the finger dictates how fast the fingernail grows. Therefore, the nail on your middle finger grows the fastest, and on average, your toenails grow twice as slow as your fingernails.

The average human blinks their eyes 6,205,000 times each year.

The entire length of all the eyelashes shed by a human in their life is over 98 feet (30 m).

Your skull is made up of 29 different bones.

Your ears and nose continue to grow throughout your entire life.

After you die, your body starts to dry out creating the illusion that your hair and nails are still growing after death.

Hair is made from the same substance as fingernails.

The average surface of the human intestine is 656 square feet (200 m).

A healthy adult can draw in about 200 to 300 cubic inches (3.3 to 4.9 liters) of air at a single breath, but at rest only about 5% of this volume is used.

The surface of the human skin is 6.5 square feet (2m).
15 million blood cells are destroyed in the human body every second.


The pancreas produces Insulin.

The most sensitive cluster of nerves is at the base of the spine.

The human body is comprised of 80% water.

The average human will shed 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime.

Every year about 98% of the atoms in your body are replaced.

The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet (9 m).

You were born with 300 bones. When you get to be an adult, you have 206.

Human thighbones are stronger than concrete.

Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

There are 45 miles (72 km) of nerves in the skin of a human being.

The average human heart will beat 3,000 million times in its lifetime and pump 48 million gallons of blood.

Each square inch (2.5 cm) of human skin consists of 20 feet (6 m) of blood vessels.

During a 24-hour period, the average human will breathe 23,040 times.

Human blood travels 60,000 miles (96,540 km) per day on its journey through the body

How to start a conversation with New people

Whether you are a host or a guest, there are many social situations that will call for interaction, even when you are stumped for some way to get it going. For example, you might want to help a friend’s new “significant other” feel comfortable. Or, you might see a stranger across a crowded room, and realize that this is your only chance to impress Mr. or Ms. Wonderful. Then, you realize that you’re not sure what to say.

1. Start with a “hello,” and simply tell the new person your name then ask them theirs. Offer your hand to shake, upon his/her responding to you. (If you go to other countries, greet the person in tune with the particular culture). If you already know the person, skip this step and proceed to step.
2. Look around. See if there is anything worth pointing out. Sure, talking about the weather is a cliche, but if there’s something unusual about it–bam!–you’ve got a great topic of conversation.
3. Offer a compliment. Don’t lie and say you love someone’s hair when you think it’s revolting, but if you like his or her shoes, or a handbag, say so. A sincere compliment is a wonderful way to get someone to warm up to you. But be careful not to say something so personal that you scare the person off or make him or her feel uncomfortable. It is best not to compliment a person’s looks or body.
4. Ask questions! Most people love to talk about themselves — get them going. “What classes are you taking this year?” “Have you seen (Insert-Something-Here)? What did you think of it?” Again, keep the questions light and not invasive. Do not ask too many questions if he or she is not responsive to them.
5. Jump on any conversation-starters he or she might offer; take something he or she has said and run with it. Agree, disagree, ask a question about it, or offer an opinion, just don’t let it go by without notice.
6. Look your newfound friend in the eye, it engenders trust (but don’t stare). Also, use the person’s name a time or two during the conversation; it will help you remember the name, and will draw the person’s attention to what you are talking about.
7. Don’t forget to smile and have fun with your conversation!

TIPS

• Just relax. Chances are that whatever small-talk you’re making isn’t going to stick out in anyone’s mind a few months from now. Just say whatever comes into your head, so long as it’s not offensive or really weird. (Unless, of course, the person you’re attempting to converse with is into weird stuff.)
• Remember, if you think of something in your head while you’re talking, it’s probably related.
• It will help if you watch some TV, listen to radio shows, and/or read a lot — newspapers, magazines, and/or books. You need to have some idea of what is going on in the world. Also remember and plan to share anything you like, think is funny, or find intriguing. This is building up your own library of things that might be helpful to another person during a conversation someday. It will be amazing how you thread these interesting things when you least expect it, and make conversation an adventure instead of a dreadful task. If you take it to the next step and say things that you want the person to think of as adding value, and keep to yourself things that the person might not, you are actually honing your own personality to be appealing to the other person, and what is a greater act of kindness than that.
• If you are shy, it will be helpful to have thought about a topic or two that you could talk about.
• Follow the lead that your listener is expressing. If he or she appears interested, then continue. If he or she is looking at a clock or watch, or worse, looking for an escape strategy, then you have been going on for too long.
• Interesting and funny quotes or facts can lighten things up, and make way for things to talk about. You could also use a set of conversation starter question cards for inspiration.
• If talking over the phone, keep the person involved in the conversation at all costs. If you can’t come up with a good topic, try the “questions” game. Just keep asking them questions; random questions work just fine as long as they are appropriate. This technique can save a phone conversation. The questions should be open ended questions that do not require a yes or no answer. For example “How do you know the hosts?” This way you can ask questions about what they just said or follow up with how you know the hosts (for example) instead of acting as if the conversation is an interrogation.
• Half of an effective conversation is the way you non-verbally communicate, and not necessarily what you say. Practice better non-verbal skills that are friendly and confident.
• Read newspapers and magazines to increase your knowledge so you can have more interesting things to talk about.