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Report on In Your Dreams! What's In Your Head When You're Asleep?
Smart girls decide for themselves™.
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We posted this survey in November to find out what goes on in your head while you're asleep. Dreams are a fascinating thing. Just think! Even when you're not conscious, your brain is still at work and thinking all on its own. What does it think about? That's what this survey aimed to find out.
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A good number of SmartGirls decided to take this survey - 423 to be precise. Before we jump into all your dream drama, let's take a quick peek at some basic info about our dreamers so you know who you are! Here's the rundown:
More girls than boys took this survey (per usual). 391 girls, 21 boys.
Some of you were as young as 7, and a few people were even older than 21. But most of you were between the ages of 11 and 16.
More of you identified yourselves as the oldest kid in your family than the middle child, youngest or an only.
You live in many different settings, though the largest numbers of you live in towns or suburbs. That's a pretty common trend.
You come from many different countries around the world: from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (literally, from A to Z!).
And you are descended from many different racial/ethnic backgrounds. This bar graph will give you a better idea of what those are:
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| What is your racial/ethnic background? |
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| As you can see from this graph, many different backgrounds are represented. |
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People are always debating whether how much sleep (and how well you're sleeping) affects how much and what you dream about. Maybe you've heard about the levels of sleep you can be in? Don't worry - we didn't go so far as to ask about those (hey, we're no experts!), but we did ask how much sleep you're getting on average every night. Thank goodness, only 3 of you said you don't have time to sleep. It looks like the majority of you get between 5 to 8 hours of sleep a night, and a lucky 49 of you get 9 hours or more! We're not going to try to figure out how the amount of sleep you're getting relates to your dreams here, but...wait a second, did someone just say "Wow, that would be a sweet SmartCenter project!"? :)
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So the key to taking a survey all about your dreams is remembering them, right? Otherwise you might not be able to answer all of the questions so well! But how well do we remember our slumber thoughts? Take a gander at this pie graph. It shows that all but 5 of you remember your dreams at least on occasion, though it looks like a good number remember your dreams more than that!
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| How often do you remember your dreams? |
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| A little more than half of you said you remember your dreams at least some of the time (about half the time). |
Well, that's not really too much of a wonder considering you told us, in another question, that you think you dream a lot of the time. Almost all of you said you dream every night or almost every night. Did you know that experts think we spend about two hours a night dreaming? That means the average person spends about 6 years of her or his life dreaming! Crazy! So let's compare how much you think you dream now with how much you dreamt when you were younger. There wasn't one big answer on this one. Some of you said you used to dream more then, some of you said you dream more now, and some of you said you think you dream about the same amount now as you used to. The numbers were all pretty close.
Oh, there are so many more things about dreams we can talk about! Everyone's dreams are so different, it's a wonder we managed to limit this survey to only a few questions. Let's take a look at another standard: how realistic do you think your dreams are? The biggest number of you said that your dreams generally focus on things that probably wouldn't happen in everyday life (like finding you're suddenly dating Zac Efron), and another sizable portion of you said that while sometimes your dreams center on everyday things, there are also strange supernatural elements to them, like being able to fly. That sounds pretty cool to me!
So what prompts your dreaming? Have you ever thought about it? Have you noticed a trend? A large number of you (132) told us you tend to dream more when you've been experiencing strong feelings of love. Ooh la la! Fewer of you dream more when you're stressed out (55) or experiencing feelings of anger or hate (17). But some of you weren't quite sure! Some of you (78) have thought about it but can't figure out a connection, and 134 of you had never considered the idea before.
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Now there's an age-old question. People are always debating what dreams mean, if they mean anything at all. What do you gals think? Well, according to our survey, only 89 of you think that dreams don't have a meaning at all - they're just random with no connection to reality. Before I give the rest away, check out this bar graph. On the graph, "subconscious" means you chose, " Yes, I think that dreams are your subconscious trying to tell you something." And "communicate" means " Yes, I think that dreams are someone/something (God, gods, spirits, ancestors, etc.) else trying to communicate with you." "Random" means what I mentioned before - that you don't think dreams mean anything special.
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| Do you think that dreams have meaning? |
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| Wow, the majority of you believe dreams are your subconscious trying to tell you something! Better listen up! |
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What about those pesky dreams that just keep getting replayed in your head? You know what I'm talking about. You have a crazy dream one month, and then a few months later, it's back! Or maybe yours come every night or every week. They're called recurring dreams, and you have to wonder - why do they come back? Do they have some really special significance? While we don't know the answer to that question, we do know how many of you experience these recurring dreams, and this bar graph will let you in on the answer, too.
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| Do you have a recurring dream? (Do you keep having the same dream over and over?) |
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| Only 108 of you have never had a recurring dream. |
What do you dream about? We asked this as an open-ended question, just to see what you'd say (plus, we didn't think we could brainstorm all the possible topics that your dreams might cover!). We asked pretty broadly - what common themes pop up in your head when you're slumbering away? Lots of you told us you dream an awful lot about your crush, and many of you mentioned school, too. Another common theme was failure, especially failure in front of people whose opinions' we care about. And you mentioned many dreams about falling - off ladders, from cliffs - you name it, you girls are probably dreaming you're falling off it. Here are some other answers you submitted:
"Being a victim of crime, missing something great by the skin of my teeth, romantic involvement with both sexes (the same sex I never think about during the day), travel."
"Normally I dream about totally crazy stuff, but I always notice that people who I haven't seen in years or just the random person I see every day at the bus stop are in my dream. People who I have no significant relationships with really."
"My dreams are usually a warped version of my life, like being chased by three witches in the store Target, or being able to fly down the stairs and not get hurt when I fall. Or getting shot and being fine. And being somebody like Robin Hood or Spock but being sort of in my own life. Every once in a while though my dreams are completely normal, like a dream I had about having a really bad experience in script writing class. I did fine in the class though, in real life. :)"
"I'm always trying to save somebody - like my parents and my younger sisters. I also have a lot of emotional dreams where I am mourning a death or really angry. I can never find a connection."
"I've noticed a twisted reality. Like where I KNOW it's the mall I work at or my neighborhood, but the streets are different, there are more houses, etc."
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As you may have noticed in some of the written responses above, you guys aren't always dreaming of the most pleasant stuff. Sometimes someone is out to get you, sometimes you're trying to save someone you care about - either way, those might qualify as a nightmare. The kind of dream you wake up from with your heart beating really fast, the kind that almost makes you NOT want to fall back asleep. Luckily, most SmartGirls only seem to have these once a month or even less. What are these nightmares like? Here's what some of you described:
"Something horrible is happening but I am the only one who knows what it is (like a hungry wolf is waiting behind the fence or something) and no one else will believe me so I just stay scared, quietly."
"I think it's the fact that when you're having a nightmare, it seems a lot more real. One time I had a dream that I was with my grandma (who has passed away) driving home, and the bridge we were on collapsed and it seemed like we were falling forever. Right before we hit the water, I woke up."
"One I used to have was someone used to try and shoot me with a gun and I used to run up the street and I could see the reflection of police lights but didn't ever see the police car."
"It usually involves somebody I know getting hurt or hurting me. My nightmares are very rarely "scary" dreams. Most of the time they just give me the feeling of not having any control. When I was younger however, I had nightly dreams about dolls trying to kill me and enslave my soul for all eternity (creepy huh?)."
"About once month, maybe less than that, I dream of people trying to kill me...or sometimes I dream about one of my friend stabbing me (not literal o_o;;) in the back, accidentally. I think I have nightmares more than I remember, because almost everytime I wake up, I'm sweating and my mind is racing..."
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A much better type of dream, right? And some of you might even call it the opposite of a nightmare, especially those of you who noted that in your nightmares, you don't have any control. But that's why daydreams are so nice! Because you can call the shots and let your mind go wherever YOU want it to. We asked how often you get to enjoy these types of dreams, and this graph reveals the answer.
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| How often do you daydream? |
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| All but 34 of you said you daydream at least some of the time! |
And finally, to cap things off, we thought we'd ask about your weirdest dream ever. Whether it made you laugh out loud or want to hide under your covers until morning, here's what you described:
"I can't even explain my dreams most of the time, they are so weird, but one time I dreamt I went to a Catholic school (I'm not Catholic) and it was run by nuns. The nuns started fighting and went to war and all of the students had to hide out in the basement. This guy started giving me a lecture on liking your body the way it is, right in the middle of all the chaos!"
"Once I dreamed I was a waiter at an Italian restaurant, and this rainbow-colored keychain in the shape of a donkey's head came in the door and asked to be seated. So here I am serving this rainbow donkey keychain, and the manager comes out, eats dinner with it, and they fall in love. Of course I have to be the one to coordinate their fancy romantic evening. The whole time I kept asking myself, "Why am I still working here again??"
"I did have this one dream when my family went to the beach, but the water was black and murky. We went out on the pier and suddenly everyone was gone. Somebody pushed me off the pier and I fell into the water. Beneath the pier, a lady was frying chicken. My cousin's husband was under there with a lot of other people. The lady with the fried chicken told me that my cousin had died and I had to marry her husband (which is weird, since he's like twenty eight) and then after we were married, everybody in my family got really mad and my cousin came back to life. She started to yell at me and then I woke up!"
"I was with a friend of mine at a skate park, and he was going off all of these huge ramps on some sort of motorized scooter. When I saw him, I thought it was the most hilarious thing in the world. But then I jumped on the back and tried to ride around with him. The scooter was some what small, so I fell off constantly. Then I ran home to go get my own, and when I realized that I didn't have a motorized scooter, I figured that strapping myself to a computer chair would suffice. So I proceeded to do so, and after a while I rolled myself right over to some sort of demonstration that was taking place. There were about five people (bird trainers as I later found out) and each was holding a large owl with a human head. And for five dollars you were allowed to feed the owls a very large strip of meat. I can't remember what happens next, but I do know that the owls changed into something different when you fed them."
Like we said before, we could ask a million questions because everyone's dreams are so different (as those descriptions show!), but that's all for now!
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Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts
with us!
Please remember that all web-based polls
are not scientific because the pollsters cannot randomly select the
respondents to participate in the surveys.
All our surveys are anonymous; check out our privacy
policy. All data copyright 1996-2007.
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