Men and Women Dream Differently

Researchers have found some differences between men and women when it
comes to the content of their dreams. In several studies, men reported
dreaming about weapons significantly more often than women did, while
women dreamed about references to clothing more often than men. 9
Another study showed that men's dreams tend to have more aggressive
content and physical activity, while women's dreams contain more rejection
and exclusion, as well as more conversation than physical activity. 10

Women tend to have slightly longer dreams that feature more characters.
When it comes to the characters that typically appear in dreams, men dream
about other men twice as often as they do about women, while women tend
to dream about both sexes equally.

Animals Probably Dream

Many think that when a sleeping dog wags its tail or when a sleeping cat
swats its paws, it is dreaming. While it's hard to say for sure whether this is
truly the case, researchers believe that it's likely that most animals,
including mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, do go through sleep stages,
including REM and non-REM, which means they do indeed dream. 11 
Animals might not experience dreams in the same way as humans, however.
In other words, they may not wake up, remember images, and attach a
storyline to it.

You Can Control Your Dreams

A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you are dreaming even
though you're still asleep. Lucid dreaming is thought to be a combination
state of both consciousness and REM sleep, during which you can often
direct or control the dream content.

Researchers say that people can use various techniques to learn how to lucid
dream, including "mnemonic induction of lucid dreams" (MILD) and "senses
initiated lucid dreams" (SSILD), which involve waking up after five hours and
repeating a phrase like "I will remember my dreaming," or focusing on the
stimuli (sights, sounds, sensations) in your sleep environment, respectively.

Approximately half of all people can remember experiencing at least one

instance of lucid dreaming, and some individuals are able to have lucid
dreams quite frequently.12

Negative Dreams Are More Common

Over a period of more than 40 years, researcher Calvin S. Hall, PhD,
collected over 50,000 dream accounts from college student