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This afternoon I had a nap. During that nap I had a lucid dream (most of which I no longer remember). As I was waking up, I was thinking about my dream and thought that it would be a great idea to write a list about dreams for the site. So, here are the top 10 amazing facts about dreams.

10. Blind People Dream

People 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’s need for sleep is so strong that it is able to handle virtually all physical situations to make it happen.

9. 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’s 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. Wikipedia has more on that here. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was also the brainchild of a dream.

8. 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.

7. 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.

6. 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’s 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.

5. Not Everyone Dreams in Colour

A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full colour  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 colour than one who dreams in black and white. 

4. 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.

3. 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.” 

2. 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.

1. You are paralysed while you sleep

Believe it or not, your body is virtually paralysed 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 paralysed.”

This post is another gem added to the crown of the great mathematician

SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN. Mathematicians from a US university have solved a cryptic puzzle that renowned Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan claimed came to him in his dreams on his deathbed.While on his death-bed in 1920, Ramanujan wrote a letter to his mentor, G H Hardy, outlining several new mathematical functions never before heard of, along with a hunch about how they worked, the Daily Mail said.Now, researchers say they have proved Ramanujan was right, and that the formula could explain the behaviour of black holes. "We've solved the problems from his last mysterious letters," Ken Ono, a mathematician from Emory University in Georgia, US, said.Ono said Ramanujan spent so much time thinking about maths that he flunked out of college in India twice. A devout Hindu, he thought these patterns were revealed to him by the goddess Namagiri

One of the many benefits of a floating island is that you begin with a clean sheet, and hence the potential to create an entire infrastructure from scratch leaves itself open to many new technologies being incorporated to achieve synergies well beyond the normal scope - such as Japan’s Shimizu Corporation and its idea that it can construct a self-sufficient, carbon-negative floating city in the Pacific Ocean.

   

Floating Model

                                                  

The Solar Floating Resort  uses dye-sensitized solar cells in the building fabric. The SFR is constructed of two 15-mm (0.6-in) layers of fibre glass reinforced balsa wood with a 30-cm (11.8-in) vacuum between. Puzzolante has solar cells in both the inner and outer layers, so that both artificial light from the interior and sunlight can be harvested. It's an indication of the amount of thought that is now being devoted to the future of marine habitats. By carefully conserving energy supplies, and re-harvesting them wherever possible, Puzzolante's Solar Floating Resort offers energy autonomy.now an Austrian-based company intends to manufacture much smaller, tailor made miniature floating islands, at a fraction of the cost.

THE FIRST COMMERCIAL AMPHIBIAN VEHICLE

The Gibbs Quadski is an amphibious quad bike, launched in October 2012 by .The Quadski is a 4-stroke, quad-bike that converts to a jet ski. It features a top speed of 72 km/h  on both land and water, a proprietary marine jet propulsion system, and wheel retraction. The Quadski can make transitions between land and water in 4 seconds. The Quadski uses Gibbs High Speed Amphibian  technology, which includes over 300 patents and patients pending worldwide.

The Quadski

Developed and manufactured by a Detroit based team, the Quadski shares a number of features with Gibbs' Aquada. When entering the water, by pressing a button the driver can retract the wheels into the housing within the vehicle’s body and detach them from the steering column. The transition time is a maximum of four seconds.The Quadski’s 175 bhp (130 kW) BMW engine includes a stone guard-protected intake, which draws in water before directing it through the engine driven impeller, which with the stator blades and nozzle propel the Quadski at high speed. The steering nozzle at the Quadski’s rear directs the vehicle via the handlebars.

Tamil writer D. Selvaraj, whose novel Thol (Skin), captured the pathetic living condition of tannery and municipality workers, once considered untouchables, and their struggle for social acceptance and fair wages in Dindigul between 1930 and 1958, has been selected for the Sahitya Akademi award for 2012.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

The longest known (approved) techincal word in english.Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

 a factitious word alleged to mean 'a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs.'

This word was invented in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzlers' League, at its annual meeting. The word figured in the headline for an article published by the New York Herald Tribune on February 23, 1935, titled "Puzzlers Open 103d Session Here by Recognizing 45-Letter Word":

"  Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis succeeded electrophotomicrographically as the longest word in the English language recognized by the National Puzzlers' League at the opening session of the organization's 103rd semi-annual meeting held yesterday at the Hotel New Yorker. The puzzlers explained that the forty-five-letter word is the name of a special form of silicosis caused by ultra-microscopic particles of silica volcanic dust..."