Dear LPG readers,

As I have mentioned on these LPG pages, it is good to dream and escape the realities of this world for a while, even though we don’t remember half of them. We do it every night, but less than half of us remember what happened the following day.   

I can’t help it. I love to do a bit of internet research these days, and I found some exciting work that has been done on the subject.  Predictably, quite a bit of it has found its way to the internet, and I thought I might share a little of it with you.  One thing that must be remembered is that many experts approach such subjects from various angles with varied results.   Perhaps the scientific and statistical ones are where we are likely to find any degree of accuracy, or perhaps not.

Remembering what you dreamed depends on which part of your sleep cycle you had the dream in. Some statistics indicate that only 45% of us remember our dreams. Interestingly, women are better at recall than men.  

I also found a graph showing that most people dream in colour, although the most significant proportion of those who dream in black and white are us oldies. Does that concern our fond memories of the good old-fashioned black-and-white television set? 

Something else I could not help but look at was if we remember more of our nightmares than our dreams, but I did not find much information to answer that question.  

Judging from the other popular dream topics that came up in the articles, I suspect that there are a few nightmares involved.  The lists mention scenarios such as getting lost, falling over, being naked in public, spiders, infidelity, fire and falling into the water.  I have little doubt that most of those subjects evoke nightmares rather than more positive and inspirational dreams. However, rainbows, pets and animals featured quite a bit, and money was also mentioned, although if that is in a good or bad way, it is hard to tell.   

I found quite a few variations regarding what we most dream about.  One school of thought says that dogs come out on top while losing your teeth is also up there. That sort of dream could be good if you recall being young and expecting a replacement together with a visit from the tooth fairy. But, perhaps when we pensioners visit our teeth in our dreams, we are busy remembering them fondly while worrying about how we look now that dentures are all most of us have to rely on!

JN, Croydon

JN offers a few new facts about dreaming…

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