40 facts about sleeping and dreaming.
01. The amount of sleep you need depends on your age. Babies sleep on average 16 hours, 3-18 year olds 10 hours, adults 8 hours per day.
02. Men dream about other men 70% of the time, while women dream about men just as much as about women.
03. We can only dream of faces we have seen once, whether recently or long ago.
04. Crimes committed by a sleep disorder include: drowsy driving, issuing fines, murder and rape.
05. 12% of people only dream in black and white.
06. Dreaming is normal. People who never dream sometimes suffer from a personality disorder.
07. 25% of married couples sleep separately.
08. The British were the first to develop a method to keep soldiers awake for 36 hours. When they were tired someone would come with a very bright lamp to keep them awake.
09. While dolphins sleep, only one hemisphere of the brain is at rest, the other hemisphere remains active for breathing.10. Animals that sleep the longest per day are koalas. They sleep up to 22 hours a day
11. Giraffes sleep very short. They sleep only 1.9 hours a day (in short sessions of 5-10 minutes)
12. You are more likely to die if you don’t sleep than if you don’t eat. It takes 2 weeks to starve and 10 days to die from sleep deprivation.
13. Blind people do see images in their dreams, unless they were born blind.
14. Within 5 minutes of waking up, you have already forgotten 50% of your dream. 90% after 10 minutes.
15. 1 in 50 teenagers still wet their bed.
16. The record for the longest period of no sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes in a rocking chair marathon. The record holder suffered from hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory loss.
17. It is impossible to tell if someone is really awake without strict medical supervision. Like a cat, humans can take naps with their eyes open without being aware of it.
18. If you fall asleep within five minutes at night, it means that your sleep deprivation was too great. It normally takes between 10 and 15 minutes for you to fall asleep.
19. A new baby typically results in 400-750 hours of lost sleep for the parents in the first year.
20. One of the best predictors of insomnia later in life is the development of poor sleep habits by young children.
21. The continuous brain recordings that led to the discovery of REM (rapid eye-movement) sleep were not done until 1953, partly because the scientists involved were concerned about wasting paper.22. People dream a total of about 2 hours a night and this usually starts about 90 minutes after falling asleep.
23. Dreams do not only occur during REM sleep but can also occur (but to a lesser extent) during the non-REM sleep phases.
24. Elephants sleep standing during non-REM sleep, but lie before REM sleep.
25. During REM sleep, your muscles are paralyzed. This is probably for protection to prevent you from actually carrying out a dream.
26. Dreams serve no higher purpose and are merely a byproduct of evolutionary adaptations of sleep and consciousness. Dreams also connect the different sleep cycles so that we can sleep continuously at night.
27. REM sleep aids brain development. Premature babies have 75 percent REM sleep. Similarly, a newborn kitten, rat or hamster only has REM sleep, while a newborn guinea pig (which is much more developed at birth) has almost no REM sleep.
28. The 1989 Exxon Valdez Alaska oil spill, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster have all been attributed to human error, with sleep deprivation playing a role.
29. It is estimated that fatigue played a role in 1 in 6 fatal traffic accidents.
30. Exposure to noise at night can make your immune system worse, even if you don’t wake up. Unfamiliar sounds and noise during the first and last two hours of sleep have the greatest disruptive effect on the sleep cycle.
31. The “natural alarm clock” that allows some people to wake up about when they want is caused by a burst of the stress hormone adrenocorticotropin.
32. Some sleep aids, such as barbiturates, suppress REM sleep, which can be harmful over a longer period of time.
33. The light beams from an alarm clock can be enough to disrupt your sleep cycle even if you don’t wake up fully.34. To fall asleep we have to cool down. Body temperature and the brain’s sleep-wake cycle are closely linked. That is why warm summer evenings can cause restless sleep, especially in the elderly, because the blood circulation mechanism that regulates the core temperature of the body works best between 18 and 30 degrees. But later in life, this comfort zone shrinks to between 23 and 25 degrees.
35. After five nights of sleep deprivation, three alcoholic drinks have the same effect on your body as six drinks when you’ve had enough sleep.
36. Humans sleep on average about three hours less per day than monkeys.
37. Ten percent of snorers have sleep apnea. This is a condition where patients stop breathing up to 300 times a night.
38. Snoring only occurs in non-REM sleep.
39. Most of what we now know about sleep we have learned in the past 25 years.
40. 18 to 24 year olds are more likely to suffer from reduced sleep performance than older adults.
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