I read somewhere, one time, that our sleep cycles last around ninety minutes. Which means that every hour and a half you are asleep your mind and body pass through a cycle where you sleep deeper and deeper, you dream for a bit, then you go back to normal sleep again-- rinse and repeat. This means that in an average eight hour night you experience five sleep cycles.
I have also read - maybe at a different time, from a different source - that our time in REM sleep, that is dreaming, starts out at the beginning of the night lasting only a few minutes, but by the end of the night this time can increase to between ten and fifteen minutes.
This fascinated me. I did the math. That means that in an average night the average person dreams for an average of forty-five minutes. After this I wondered if maybe we live more in our dreams than we do when we are awake, because when we dream it is just like being awake to our minds. I read that somewhere, too, that our minds act the same while dreaming as they do while we are awake. So being awake and dreaming are the same to our minds.
I remember always being told that dreams move faster than real life. I don’t know that for sure, I just remember being told that since I was a kid – and it makes sense because a lot happens in dreams, you know that. Even if it is true I don’t know how much faster dreams move than real life – and I can’t find any information from my research.
Just doing the math, though, if we sleep for an average of one-third of our life, which I read is pretty average, then for every forty-five minutes we dream we are awake for sixteen hours. Do the math again, that means if we dream 21.333 three-forever times faster than real life, then we live as much in dreams as we do when we are awake.
This makes dreaming rather important. You know, if it is true.