How fast are dreams

After recording this information, Dement would wake dreamers and have them write down a description of their most recent dream. He assumed that longer dreams would take more words to describe than shorter ones. When he compared the number of words in each dream report with the number of minutes the dream had occurred, he found that the longer the dream, the more words the dreamer used to describe it.

In another related experiment, Dement woke sleepers while they were dreaming and asked them how long they perceived their most recent dream had taken. Eighty-three percent of the time they perceived correctly whether their dreams had been going on for a long time or for a short time.

Interestingly, Windt also asked the subjects to ask other characters in the dream to tickle them. Studying the passage of time in dreams had proven trickier to study, however, until Daniel Erlacher at the University of Bern in Switzerland set up an ingenious experiment.

It began when he was investigating the way the brain imagines different actions; when we dream of running, do we activate the same regions that are busy during a race, for instance? His early experiments suggested yes, but somehow they seemed to be strangely drawn out. So, inviting some skilled lucid dreamers to his specially equipped sleep lab, he asked his subjects to perform various kinds of tasks during their dreams: once they had gained lucidity, they had to walk 10 paces, count to 30 or perform an elaborate gymnastics routine, for instance.

To time the duration of their actions, he used a peculiar aspect of the dreaming mind: although the body is paralysed, eye movements tend to be translated to the body. In this way, the subjects could signal the start and end of the actions by rolling their eyes left and right a couple of times.

Perhaps that can explain why a short dream can seem to fill the whole hour. However, these dreams tend to be much less vivid or memorable. The length of a dream can vary; they may last for a few seconds, or approximately 20—30 minutes. The average person has three to five dreams per night, and some may have up to seven; [4] however, most dreams are immediately or quickly forgotten.

During a full eight-hour night sleep, most dreams occur in the typical two hours of REM. In modern times, dreams have been seen as a connection to the unconscious mind. But experts can provide estimates about how long you may spend dreaming.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average person dreams four to six times per night. Most of the dreaming seems to occur during rapid eye movement, or REM sleep. REM sleep is one of the two basic categories of sleep that your body experiences, with the other being non-rapid eye movement NREM sleep. REM sleep cycles tend to occur about every 1. Your body will first enter REM sleep about 90 minutes after you fall asleep. But you might only remain in that first cycle of REM sleep for 5 minutes or so.

You might spend a half-hour in a cycle of REM sleep as the night wears on. If you sleep for about 8 hours, you might spend approximately one-quarter of that time in REM sleep.

Can you remember having a nightmare? But experts note that nightmares do tend to happen in later cycles of REM sleep, often in the last third of the night.

There are numerous potential causes, including stress and anxiety or certain medications. And while anyone can have an occasional heart-pounding nightmare, some people experience regular episodes of nightmare-filled sleep.

Some of these nightmares can be attributed to PTSD , while others may not seem to have a readily identifiable cause.