Have you ever tried looking for an explanation for that bizarre dream you had about loosing your teeth or falling off the top of the building? New research suggests that Earth’s magnetic field may be to blame.
Darren Lipnicki, a psychologist whose work has been published in “Medical Hypotheses”, studied the relation between Earth’s magnetic fields and dreams over a period of 8 years. During that time he wrote every dream he could remember – a total of 2,387 dreams. Then he sorted the dreams into 3 groups.
Group number one contained dreams that were most related to reality (“I’m drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.”) In the second group he put dreams that were possible, but unlikely to happen in real life (“My friend is building a house in my back yard”). In the last group he placed the most bizarre dreams (“I’m walking down the beach with a monkey who speaks a foreign language and a woman who suddenly starts to disappear”).
Dr Lipnicki then gathered data on the Earth’s geomagnetic activity. It turns out that there was a correlation between his dreams and magnetic fields – The strangest dreams occurred when Earth’s magnetic activity was lowest.
Of course it doesn’t mean that the relationship between Earth’s magnetism and dreams has been proven conclusively; “For that you need more extensive testing,” says Lipnicki.
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