Did you know that dreaming plays an important role in your well-being and health? Research has shwn that people who are deprived from entering the dream phase of sleep or the REM stage, exhibit symptoms of irritability and anxiety, leading researchers to believe that dreams help you to tackle stress. Dreaming is a necessity and helps to recharge the mind and revitalize the body.

Here are some other less-known facts about dreaming:

1One-third of your life is spent sleeping.

2In an average  lifetime, you would have spent a total of about six years of it dreaming. That is more than 2,100 days spent in a different realm!

3Dreams have been here as long as mankind.  Back in the Roman Era, profound and significant dreams were submitted to the Senate for analysis and interpretation.

4Most healthy people have dreams. Some people don't believe they dream at night when in fact they just don't remember. 

5Dreams are indispensable.  A lack of dream activity may imply some protein deficiency or a personality disorder.

6On average, you can dream anywhere from one to two hours every night. Moreover, you can have four to seven dreams in one night.

7Blind people do dream.  Whether visual images appear in their dreams depend on  whether they were blind at birth or became blind later in life. But vision is not the only sense that constitutes a dream. Sound, tactility, and smell become hypersensitive for the blind and their dreams are based on these senses. 

8Five minutes after the end of the dream, half the content is forgotten. After ten minutes, 90% is lost.

 9The word dream stems from the Middle English word, dreme which means "joy" and "music".

10Men tend to dream more about other men, while women dream equally about men and women.

11Studies have shown that your brain waves are more active when you are dreaming than when we are awake.

12Dreamers who are awakened right after REM sleep, are able to recall their dreams more vividly than those who slept through the night until morning.

13Physiologically speaking, researchers found that during dreaming REM sleep, males experience erections and females experience increased vaginal blood flow, regardless the content of the dream. In fact, "wet dreams" may not necessarily coincide with overtly sexual dream content. 

14People who are in the process of giving up smoking tend to have longer and more intense dreams.

15Toddlers do not dream about themselves. They do not appear in their own dreams until the age of 3 or 4.

16If you are snoring, then you cannot be dreaming.

17Nightmares are common in children, typically beginning at around age 3 and occurring up to age 7-8.

18In a poll, 67% of Americans  have experienced Deja Vu in their dreams, occurring more often in females than males. 

19Around 3% of adults suffer from sleep apnea. This treatable condition leads to unexplained tiredness and inefficiency.

20According to a research study,  the most common setting for dreams is your own house.

21It is very normal for males to experience an erection during the REM stage of sleep, even when they are not dreaming anything of a sexual nature.

 22The original meaning of the word "nightmare"  was a female spirit who besets people at night while they sleep.

23In dreams, negative emotions tend to occur twice as often as pleasant feelings. Fear and anxietyare the most commonly expressed emotions  in dreams, followed by anger and sadness.