10 unnecessary stupid facts about nightmares

Nice to wake up, right? When your friend comes running up the stairs upside down like an exorcist with a tongue out of his mouth? Damn it. This was a heavy one. Nightmares. The fuckers that keep you awake at night. You didn't know this yet.

1. The little bastards are specially designed for you. Not nice, huh? Your nightmares are precisely tailored to what scares YOU. As a result, your nightmares can be very ordinary dreams for someone else.

2. Very weird when you think about it, but ALL the people who play a role in your nightmares you have seen before. It may be that you just passed them on the street or saw them on TV, but they are never complete strangers. Yuck.

3. People who snack right before bed are more likely to have nightmares. So you know. If you drink alcohol regularly, that too.

4. Your eyelids twitch when you have a nightmare. Eww.

5. Blind people also have nightmares, by the way. But they rely on other senses than sight. For them, it is enough to smell someone or hear them talk.

6. We most often have nightmares about falling, losing someone we love, or being chased. Relatable.

7. Hey, as long as you don't suffer from ‘Nightmare Disorder’, you're not doing so bad. People who have this are so often terrorized by scary images at night that they end up with a sleep disorder.

8. Researchers don't know exactly why this happens, but most people have trouble mimicking hands and faces in their sleep. It may be that you are missing a finger or that your hand is deformed. This can also happen with the face: some things can fade or sometimes a part of the face is missing.

9. Fear is not the emotion that people primarily feel during a nightmare, by the way. Research shows that it is mainly confusion, guilt, or disgust that people feel before waking up drenched in sweat.

10. On average, we have four to six different dreams per night, which takes about one to two hours of your sleep. And that nightmare sometimes seems to last an hour, but really lasts a maximum of ten minutes. All dreams, by the way.