Showing posts with label Top Things. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Top Things. Show all posts

Aug 5, 2009

Top 10 Worst Things in Nature

nature by fact is the most treasured thing in the world. we meant to keep it, take care of it and do a lot of things but dont you know that there are a lot of things that could be worse than natural. it might sound silly but in natural way, somethings are meant not to be taken for granted. good thing i was able to read this blog showing the Top 10 Worst Things in Nature. Stephen Kings never had been wrong when he said that "Nature also contains some of the most awful things you can imagine – worse than anything conjured up". thanks to Amazing Facts who made this article and had been continuing to create amazing facts that are very amazing and educational.






Honey Badger (most vicious animal)


The honey badger is usually found in Africa and Western and Southern Asia. For a number of years the Guinness Book of Records has named it the “most fearless creature”. This animal (which looks deceptively cute) will attack virtually anything and it is smart enough to know its opponents weak spots. For example, when confronted by a human male, it will attack the testicles. This is also one of the few animals that uses tools – for example making use of logs as ladders. The honey badger loves honey and will dive right into a beehive with no regard to its own safety – which unfortunately often leads to its death. Honey Badgers can kill crocodiles, and are very efficient snake killers. It takes only 15 minutes for the animal to eat a 5 foot snake. The ferocity of these creatures is well known in nature and not even a leopard or lion will attempt to kill one.



Mosquito (worst insect)

There is no doubt that the mosquito has to be the worst insect in the world. Just as summer starts, the mosquitos come out in force ready to feast upon the pasty white legs of humans that have been locked inside for winter. At night as you lie in bed you can hear them buzzing but you can’t see them – and then next morning a huge welt appears on the tip of your nose because the mosquito chowed down on it. Oh – and it also happens to be the most deadly insect in the world because it spreads malaria – in fact, it is believed that half the human population that has died through history, died because of the female mosquito bite. God must have been pre-occupied the day he was creating the animals, because he didn’t notice Satan making the mosquito.





Fatal Familial Insomnia
(worst disease symptoms)

Fatal Familial Insomnia is a terrible disease found in only 28 families around the world. The disease prevents you from sleeping and no medication available can help you. When the disease begins, you generally have from 7 to 36 months of sleepless nights until you finally die. Wikipedia describes the stages of the disease thus:

  1. The patient suffers increasing insomnia, resulting in panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias. This stage lasts for about four months.
  2. Hallucinations and panic attacks become noticeable, continuing for about five months.
  3. Complete inability to sleep is followed by rapid loss of weight. This lasts for about three months.
  4. Dementia, where the patient becomes unresponsive or mute over the course of six months. This is the final progression of the disease, and the patient will subsequently die.






Bullet Ant (most painful bite)

The bullet ant is ranked as having the most painful sting in the world – often likened to the pain of being shot, described thus: “waves of burning, throbbing, all-consuming pain that continues unabated for up to 24 hours”. The ant is found in Nicaragua south to Paraguay and, like other ants, they live in large colonies which are usually situated at the base of trees. The ants are used in an initiation rite for boys in the Satere-Mawe tribe of Brazil. The boys are made to wear a glove with hundreds of these ants attached – they must suffer the stings for 10 minutes and they must perform this ritual multiple times. The boys arm is usually paralyzed temporarily from the poison and their bodies can shake for days. You can watch the rite of passage on youtube – I don’t recommend it for the weak of heart.








Salvinia Molesta (most intrusive weed)

Also known as kariba weed, the salvinia molesta plant is an aquatic fern from Brazil. It floats on top of water and doubles in size every few days. This usually results in lakes that become completely covered by a mat of the plant up to 24 inches high. The intrusive weed prevents sunlight from entering the water which, in turn, prevents animal and plant life from surviving. To make matters worse, you can’t kill the plant. If you break it into small pieces, each piece will spawn a new plant. In the US attempts have been made to remove it using cranes, but all it takes is one tiny piece to restart the whole growing process. It is now found around the world and causes havoc everywhere it goes. In the image above, what appears to be a nice lawn is actually an entire lake covered with salvinia molesta.






Corpse Flower(smelliest plant)

The corpse flower thrives in the grasslands bordering rain forests in Sumatra (though it is now found around the world in display gardens). It grows a single enormous flower which produces a smell that is remarkably similar to a rotting corpse (hence its name). The flower grows to over 10 feet wide and its coloring is designed to mimic the look of rotting meat – to help entice the carrion eating insects that pollinate it. The tip of the corpse flower is nearly the same temperature as the human body which probably helps to spread the stink and adds to the illusion that it is really rotten flesh. Here is an excellent youtube clip with David Attenborough presenting the corpse flower.









Brazilian Wandering Spider (worst spider)

It is huge. It has one of the most painful bites in the spider world. It is the most deadly spider; forget the funnel web spider – this thing is dangerous. It has the highest human kill rate in the world. To make things even worse, a bite from this spider causes an erection that lasts for hours. No – this is not a subtle ad for viagra; it really is a side-effect of a wandering spider bite. Emergency room staff are able to immediately recognize a person suffering from a bite. Needless to say, the venom is being studied for possible medical uses for people suffering erectile disfunction.









Candiru (nastiest fish)

The Candiru is a small parasitic catfish which is found mostly in the Amazon river where it is the most feared fish – even more so than piranhas. The fish can grow to a maximum length of around six inches. Candiru feed on the blood of their host creatures by swimming into the gills and using razor sharp spines on its head to attach itself. It then chews its way through the host until it reaches a major artery and drinks blood until it is satiated. The fish finds its prey by sniffing the water and this is where it starts to get nasty: the smell of human urine appeals to candirus and they can find their way to a human penis or vagina under the water and enter it. When this happens, the fish attaches itself (causing great pain to the poor human) and it can generally only be removed through surgery. This is a very unpleasant situation to be in – so be warned: don’t pee in the Amazon river. You can watch a youtube clip about the candiru here. And if you are able to cope with disgusting images, check out the photo of a doctor removing a candiru from a man’s nether-regions.







Botulinum Toxin (deadliest thing ever)

Botulinum toxin is produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and it is, beyond a doubt, the deadliest known protein. If the clostridium botulinum spores find their way to food or wounds, they will begin to release the toxin which leads to poisoning if eaten. It is so deadly that a mere two pounds (roughly 1kg) of the stuff is enough to kill the entire human population. It is so deadly that it is potentially useful as a biological weapon. This is the kind of thing we obviously want to keep right away from right? Well, no. Millions of people have this deadly protein injected into their face every year; it is present in minute quantities in Botox which is used to “treat” wrinkle

Jul 29, 2009

10 Reason to hate the iPhone 3G

i ain't an anti iPhone person. but this is quite informative knowing that most people wanted to buy such phone. got this one from this Link.



Is the iPhone 3G really deserving of the nickname Jesusphone?

Sure, the iPhone 3G is a groundbreaking phone. There's a lot to love about it… the amazingly easy-to-use touchscreen interface, amazing video playback, a big, bright, high contrast, high-resolution display that's the best of any smartphone on the market, and a web browser that's as good as any you'd use on a desktop computer. Not to mention Apple's new MobileMe service which will provide over the air syncing of your email, contacts, calendar, tasks and photos with your home or office computer — no plugging in required.

But there are a lot of big disappointments with the iPhone 3G too. Some of them are stubborn commercial decisions Apple has made; others look like oversights, and others are fundamental flaws in the design of the phone itself.

Think I don't know jack? Before you post an angry comment, read through the 10 points and then tell me what you think.


#1 No upgrade to the camera

The camera in the first-gen iPhone was only two megapixels with no flash. "Fair enough," I thought… "it's a first-gen product. They have to leave themselves room to move for the upgrade they'll surely put into the next-generation iPhone." No such luck. The camera in the iPhone 3G is exactly the same as the first-gen one. Still stuck at two megapixels. Still unable to cope in low-light and still no flash. Oh, and there's no video recording capability either, even though this has been found on phones for the last five years or so.

Scorecard:
iPhone 3G: 2 megapixel camera, no flash, no video, no optical zoom
Other phones: up to 5 megapixel cameras, optical zoom, lens-based autofocus, flash.
Verdict: Smackdown by other phones.



#2 No Adobe Flash support

Undeniably, the iPhone has the best web browser of any phone on the market. But when you hit a web page with Adobe Flash in it, you'll just get an empty space with a 'missing plugin' icon. Apple says Flash would run too slowly on the iPhone, but in reality, it's probably more to do with Apple wanting to promote its competing web app development technology, Sproutcore.

Apple realises the 'mobile web' is at a tipping point… if it can get enough momentum behind developers coding sites specifically for the iPhone, it will help sales of the iPhone along in the long term. (That said, unlike Flash, Sproutcore is an open standard that theoretically works in any web browser that supports Javascript, so it could be widely supported by all handset makers if their phone web browsers got better.)

For a laugh, check out Steve Jobs demonstrating the web browser on the iPhone. When he views The New York Times, up pops the 'missing flash' icon.


Scorecard:
iPhone: no Adobe Flash support
Other smartphones: Flash Lite support, or full Flash support on Windows Mobile.(Admittedly Flash support on other phones isn't great either, but then, they're not running a full computer operating system like the iPhone is, where it would be trivially easy to port Flash across to run on it.)
Verdict: Other phones win by a narrow margin.



#3 No instant messaging

Despite the fact that the iPhone comes with unlimited data plans (in the US at least; Australian plans haven't yet been revealed) Apple has hobbled the iPhone's ability to do instant messaging.

Rather than sending instant messages over the internet to friends, the iPhone sends them by SMS. Since Apple has great instant messaging software for Mac called iChat, this is undoubtedly a concession to phone companies. SMS is widely considered to be the most expensive data service in the world, with each message only 165 characters long but charged by phone companies at around 20c per message. Multiplied out, that equates to 1.3 million dollars per gigabyte of SMSes. (By comparison, Aussie mobile network Three offers 1GB of high speed internet usage for $15.)

Oh yeah, and forget about chatting to someone who's sitting at a computer using the iPhone. Heaven forbid you might want to chat to someone using MSN/Windows Live Chat, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, Facebook or any of the other popular chat protocols.

Hopefully, this ludicrous situation will be plugged by third-party application developers who will develop internet-based chat clients for iPhone. However, Apple has said that it will not allow applications to run in the background on the iPhone; instead, the developers must run an internet-based service, send a message to Apple servers, which will then send a message to the iPhone to alert the user to open the app. Yes, it may save battery life on the iPhone, but no, it's not exactly convenient.

On a Blackberry, the Blackberry Messenger just sits quietly in the background. If your phone is on, so is Blackberry Messenger. It's 100% reliable. It doesn't send messages using a stupid method like SMS. It uses the Blackberry's unlimited internet access. And yes, Blackberries do have good battery life.


Scorecard:
iPhone 3G: SMS is the only way to instant message people.
Other smartphones: A large variety of instant messaging software that can send messages using the internet capability of the phone.
Verdict: iPhone is shamed by other phones.



#4 Totally impractical for international travel

The iPhone downloads full emails, attachments and all, when you view them on the iPhone. If someone sends you an email with several megabytes of photos attached, that's how much data has to be downloaded by the iPhone. That's fine if you're in your home country and have an unlimited data plan. But go to another country and see how much it costs you — you can expect to pay up to $20 per megabyte. Your roaming charges will soon be running into hundreds of dollars.

Not to harp on about the Blackberry, but when you roam with one of them, it's quite cheap, because the Blackberry servers downscale images to perfectly fit the size of the Blackberry screen before sending them — a huge saving in data transfer charges, and messages are heavily compressed before transmission, etc. In fact, even heavy Blackberry users may be surprised to learn that they use less than 5MB of data per month.

Scorecard:
iPhone 3G: It's the data equivalent of the gas guzzling SUVs that GM suspended production of this week.
Other smartphones: Well, there are certainly other data guzzling phones. But Blackberry is a perfect example of a smartphone that's made for roaming.
Verdict: Blackberry wins



#5 Not compatible with Bluetooth car kits or headphones

Apple has Bluetooth wireless in the iPhone, but it only works with a handful of wireless headsets. Forget talking handsfree on Bluetooth car kits or using the iPhone with stereo Bluetooth headphones. You could expect those sorts of features from the world's leading music player, but not the iP… oh, wait.

Considering Apple wants the world to take the iPhone seriously for its phone capabilities, it's truly incredible that it has hobbled the Bluetooth audio capability so much. Could it be because it wants to make money from car equipment manufacturers who build an iPod dock connector into their car stereos?

Caveat: this comment is based on what we know about pre-release versions of the iPhone 2.0 software. It's possible Apple will have fixed this in the release version of the iPhone 3G.

Scorecard:
iPhone 3G: only works with Apple's mono Bluetooth headset and a handful of other companies' similar units. No support for Bluetooth stereo or in-car Bluetooth handsfree.
Other smartphones: many support stereo Bluetooth for streaming to headphones or a stereo, and most models work with Bluetooth car handsfree units (though there are still compatibility glitches between brands, admittedly.)
Verdict: Other phones win



#6 No cut and paste

This one is truly hard to understand. Apple brings out one of the world's most advanced smartphones in terms of user interface, and somehow forgets to put in cut and paste... probably the only smartphone on the market that doesn't have it. The mind boggles. (Also something that Apple could conceivably fix by the time the iPhone 3G is released… here's hoping.)

Scorecard:
iPhone 3G: No cut and paste.
Other smartphones: Well, yeah, duh. They have cut and paste.
Verdict: Decisive victory for other phones.



#7 Non user-replaceable battery

It's a sad fact about rechargeable batteries: the first time you recharge them, their maximum capacity degrades. After a few hundred recharges, their capacity is down to something like half their original capacity. Normally, this is annoying, but manageable — you just swap the battery out for a new one, or get a second battery and swap between the two of them until the first battery is toast.

Not so with the iPhone. Its battery is sealed up tightly inside the nearly-impossible-to-pry-open casing (believe me, I've taken the back off an iPhone and that sucker is not meant to come apart… Apple must be replacing the casing of iPhones it services). Apple will then install the battery for you (in the US it costs $US85.95) and post it back to you. Oh, and you can pay them extra $US30 for the privilege of renting another phone from them to use in the meantime.

Not only is this massively inconvenient, it's a cunning attempt by Apple to get people to simply buy a new iPhone when the battery finally dies. People will be asking themselves… "do I pay $105.95 to get my old iPhone battery fixed, or do I pay $199.00 to buy the latest and greatest model of iPhone?" I know which one I'd pick, and I bet that's central to Apple's business plan.


Scorecard:
iPhone 3G: Battery sealed inside the case. Costs a hundred bucks and considerable inconvenience to get it replaced.
Other smartphones: Well, yeah, duh. You just unplug the battery and put a new one in.
Verdict: Crushing loss to Apple.



#8 No MMS

So you've snapped a nice photo on your iPhone and you want to send it to a friend? You'd better hope they have email on their phone, because that's the only way you're going to be able to send it to them with the iPhone. For some reason, despite its ridiculous decision to force all instant messaging through SMS, Apple has totally left out MMS (picture/video SMSes) from the iPhone.

Scorecard:
iPhone 3G: No MMS support. You will send your photos using the Apple-authorized method, by email.
Other smartphones: Well, yeah, duh. They have MMS.
Verdict: Own-goal by Apple.


#9 No turn-by-turn navigation

Despite building a GPS satellite navigation receiver into the iPhone, Apple has stopped short of offering voiced, turn-by-turn navigation into the device. Yes, you can plot directions from your current position to somewhere else, and you can watch yourself as a little dot on the map, but have you ever tried doing that in a car? I have … on my Blackberry. I nearly crashed.

If you're thinking I'm being a bit overly critical (isn't it a "nice to have" feature than a necessity?) compare Apple to Nokia, which has been offering voiced, 3D, turn-by-turn navigation on its phones for a couple of years now. Having a Nokia N78 saved my bacon recently when I realised I was totally lost and didn't have a street directory with me. I also had a Blackberry with me that has 2D map routing similar to what's on the Blackberry, and it sucked, because it was like reading a map constantly while driving.


Scorecard:
iPhone 3G: No voiced, 3D turn-by-turn navigation.
Other smartphones: OK, so it's not a standard feature on all phones. But Nokia, which has over 50% market share in Australia, has been shipping it with its phones for the last couple of years.
Verdict: Nokia wins.


#10 Stunning hypocrisy

At Apple's last presentation on the iPhone (March 6th 2008), Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller ridiculed market leader Blackberry for the complexity of its push email service, pointing out that your messages have to pass through a RIM messaging server and a network operations centre before they're sent out to your phone. Plus you have to pay extra for the service.

With the iPhone 3G, Apple introduces MobileMe, a service that … passes your email through an Apple messaging server before it is sent through to your phone. And it costs $AUD119 per year extra. Spot any similarity with the Blackberry business model?

It seems stunningly hypocritical for Apple's to criticise the technology of the market leader in the US smartphone space, then adopt the same technologies in its own product. On the other hand, I'm glad it has… but I'm flabbergasted at Apple's audacity in working on a service while at the very same moment criticising others for doing it.


Scorecard:
iPhone 3G: made by a company dominated by self-serving hypocrites.
Other smartphones: let's be honest... made by companies dominated by self-serving hypocrites.
Verdict: Apple is on even footing with other handset makers. Welcome to the industry!


.... with those features, would still like to have this?

10 Things Why not to have an Apple Iphone



Read and find out for yourselves.


1. Slow mobile data: EDGE is 2.5G, so the top speed you can get from it is about 100Kbit/s. Also, the only Australian phone network that supports it is Telstra - everyone else will only be able to use slower-than-dialup GPRS. The iPhone would be way cooler with 1.8Mbit/s HSDPA. (See our analysis of why Apple probably used EDGE in preference to 3G in our previous iPhone report).

2. Battery life sucks: Five hours of talk/browsing/email or 16 hours of audio playback? Look, we're not saying the iPhone isn't an amazing device, but you're going to want a charger on your desk at work, one in your car, one on your bedside table...

3. Built-in battery: It must be the only mobile phone on the market that doesn't have an easily user-replaceable battery. We know from the iPod that batteries age pretty quickly, but who wants to send their phone back to Apple for servicing when it needs a new battery? I don't want to have to go back to my dowdy old Nokia while Apple swaps the battery. That's a major flaw.

4. Touch screen: Have you ever stood at a touch-screen terminal in a shop punching away at the screen, trying to get it to register your touch? Despite what Apple disparagingly called "small plastic keyboards" on other mobiles, they're way more likely to work reliably than a touch-screen. No doubt Jobs has licensed the world's best touch-screen technology, but it's still likely to be the weakest point of the phone.

5. Heavy data usage: There's a reason why networks love ‘push email' phones like the Blackberry: it's because a tremendous amount of compression and optimisation can be done at the carrier-side before the data is sent over the air. An ultra-heavy user of a Blackberry might only use 20MB in a month - regular users will use just a few megs. On the other hand, the iPhone uses old-world ‘polling' email methods - POP3 or IMAP, where the phone will check every X minutes for new email and download full emails. The phone might have enough CPU power to rescale that 7MB JPEG, but it still has to download a 7MB JPEG. Either the service fees that go with the phone are going to be huge, or carriers are going to take a bath on data pricing and risk network congestion.

6. Only a two megapixel camera: OK, camera phones are never going to beat a digital SLR, but Sony Ericsson has had a 3.2 Megapixel cameraphone out for months now. Unless S-E tied up exclusive supply on that part, it's tough to see why Apple wouldn't have gone for it.

7. Proprietary tie-ins: Look, I'm not saying that the rest of the mobile industry isn't rife with proprietary tie-ins. Every carrier installs their crap onto mobiles, they disable useful manufacturer features so that you're forced to use their less-useful and more expensive services. But shouldn't we hold Apple to a higher standard? The iPhone can do push email according to Jobs, but only for people who have a Yahoo webmail account. Bad luck if you prefer Gmail or some other mail provider.

8. No video iChat: Er, hello? Apple has an incredible base of customers out there with integrated webcams - doubtlessly more than any other PC or software maker - so what a missed opportunity!

9. Apple chooses your mobile network: Apple has announced that its exclusive sales partner in the US will be the mobile network Cingular. Presumably, that's because even though iPhone is going to be an obvious hit, there are many political battles Apple faces in breaking into the telco world: powerful alliances and rebate schemes between handset makers and networks, the networks' fears that Apple might at some point introduce iTunes purchasing over-the-air, stealing away one of their valuable revenue streams and more. The end result? In each country, the phone will probably be locked to one carrier. (Interestingly, though, in Australia, carriers are legally obliged to unlock phones free of charge at the customer's request - though that doesn't cancel other contractual obligations such as ongoing plan fees.)

10. Only 8GB storage: Ok, ok, sure, it's the biggest storage capacity of any phone on the market, probably, but 8GB is still pretty limited. Considering how good the video playback capabilities of the iPhone are, it's unfortunate that you won't actually be able to fit that much video on the device.



10 Facts about Dreams

i was tired and bored while at work at bumped in to this thing about dream.
this website publishes top 10 things about everything in the world but this one caught my attention more. credits for Listverse for this one.


10. Blind People Dream




People who become blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion. It is hard for a seeing person to imagine, but the body’s need for sleep is so strong that it is able to handle virtually all physical situations to make it happen.






9. You Forget 90% of your Dream


Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream if forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone. The famous poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, woke one morning having had a fantastic dream (likely opium induced) – he put pen to paper and began to describe his “vision in a dream” in what has become one of English’s most famous poems: Kubla Khan. Part way through (54 lines in fact) he was interrupted by a “Person from Porlock“. Coleridge returned to his poem but could not remember the rest of his dream. The poem was never completed.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

[...]

Curiously, Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the story of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde whilst he was dreaming. Wikipedia has more on that here. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was also the brainchild of a dream.



8. Everybody Dreams

Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder) but men and women have different dreams and different physical reactions. Men tend to dream more about other men, while women tend to dream equally about men and women. In addition, both men and women experience sexually related physical reactions to their dreams regardless of whether the dream is sexual in nature; males experience erections and females experience increased vaginal blood flow.



7. Dreams Prevent Psychosis

In a recent sleep study, students who were awakened at the beginning of each dream, but still allowed their 8 hours of sleep, all experienced difficulty in concentration, irritability, hallucinations, and signs of psychosis after only 3 days. When finally allowed their REM sleep the student’s brains made up for lost time by greatly increasing the percentage of sleep spent in the REM stage.



6. We Only Dream What we Know


Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts – did you know that your mind is not inventing those faces – they are real faces of real people that you have seen during your life but may not know or remember? The evil killer in your latest dream may be the guy who pumped petrol in to your Dad’s car when you were just a little kid. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces through our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams.

Just paying the bills...



5. Not Everyone Dreams in Colors

A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. People also tend to have common themes in dreams, which are situations relating to school, being chased, running slowly/in place, sexual experiences, falling, arriving too late, a person now alive being dead, teeth falling out, flying, failing an examination, or a car accident. It is unknown whether the impact of a dream relating to violence or death is more emotionally charged for a person who dreams in color than one who dreams in black and white.



4. Dreams are not about what they are about

If you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language. The unconscious mind tries to compare your dream to something else, which is similar. Its like writing a poem and saying that a group of ants were like machines that never stop. But you would never compare something to itself, for example: “That beautiful sunset was like a beautiful sunset”. So whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself.


3. Quitters have more vivid Dreams

People who have smoked cigarettes for a long time who stop, have reported much more vivid dreams than they would normally experience. Additionally, according to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology: “Among 293 smokers abstinent for between 1 and 4 weeks, 33% reported having at least 1 dream about smoking. In most dreams, subjects caught themselves smoking and felt strong negative emotions, such as panic and guilt. Dreams about smoking were the result of tobacco withdrawal, as 97% of subjects did not have them while smoking, and their occurrence was significantly related to the duration of abstinence. They were rated as more vivid than the usual dreams and were as common as most major tobacco withdrawal symptoms.”


2. External Stimuli Invade our Dreams

This is called Dream Incorporation and it is the experience that most of us have had where a sound from reality is heard in our dream and incorporated in some way. A similar (though less external) example would be when you are physically thirsty and your mind incorporates that feeling in to your dream. My own experience of this includes repeatedly drinking a large glass of water in the dream which satisfies me, only to find the thirst returning shortly after – this thirst… drink… thirst… loop often recurs until I wake up and have a real drink. The famous painting above (Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening) by Salvador Dali, depicts this concept.


1. You are paralyzed while you sleep

Believe it or not, your body is virtually paralyzed during your sleep – most likely to prevent your body from acting out aspects of your dreams. According to the Wikipedia article on dreaming, “Glands begin to secrete a hormone that helps induce sleep and neurons send signals to the spinal cord which cause the body to relax and later become essentially paralyzed.”



Bonus: Extra Facts
  1. When you are snoring, you are not dreaming.
  2. Toddlers do not dream about themselves until around the age of 3. From the same age, children typically have many more nightmares than adults do until age 7 or 8.
  3. If you are awakened out of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, you are more likely to remember your dream in a more vivid way than you would if you woke from a full night sleep.