Reading:
5. Read the passage and choose T (True) and F (False).
Three things you probably didn’t know about sleep
Everybody loves it, everybody needs it. No one seems to get enough of it. We all know that most people need eight hours of sleep and that REM* sleep is when you have the most dreams but here are three questions about sleep that you may not know the answer to:
• How can video games help us control our dreams?
• What is Sleeping Beauty Syndrome?
• What did our ancestors use to do in the middle of the night?
A university psychologist in Canada believes that people who play video games are more likely to be able to control their own dreams. Jayne Gackenbach studied the dreams of regular video gamers and non-gamers and found that people who frequently played video games experienced “lucid” dreams more often. A lucid dream is one in which we are aware that we are dreaming. In a lucid dream, a dreamer is sometimes able to control or influence what is happening to them in the dream-very similar to controlling the action of a character in a video game.
“Dreams and video games are both parallel universes,” says Gackenbach. “ Gamers spend hours a day in a virtual reality and they are used to controlling their game environments, and this seems to help them to do the same when they are dreaming.
Gackenbach also discovered that video gamers have fewer nightmares than non-gamers. Some experts believe that we have nightmares to help us practice for life-threatening situations in a safe environment. Since video gamers already practice those situations regularly in games, Gackenbach’s research suggests that video gamers may have less need of nightmares. But, interestingly, when gamers do have a nightmare, they react differently to non-gamers: “What happens with gamers?” says Gackenbach “Is that when they have a scary experience in a dream they don’t run away like most of us do. They run around and fight back.
5.1.When we have a “lucid” dream we know that we’re dreaming.
