Science is just beginning to understand the factors that control your dreams, but what we've discovered so far is weird as hell.

It seems like the fantasy worlds we inhabit after we tuck in for the night are pretty much out of our control. One minute you're dreaming about winning the Nobel Prize in physics, and the next minute you're fist-fighting a cybernetic Stephen Hawking. But there is nothing magical about your dreams -- they are a function of your brain's biology, which means that there are actual, physical reasons why in last night's dream your mother transformed into a gorilla instead of, say, a wombat.

5 The Earth's Magnetic Field Makes Dreams More Bizarre

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If that headline sounds like New Age bullshit to you, like maybe we're going to start talking about how dreams are visions from your spirit's magnetic energy matrix or something, calm down -- as weird as this is, the science behind it is more straightforward than you think. As we have mentioned before, your brain's pineal gland can sense geomagnetic activity. It's not magic -- it's just helping to regulate hormones for your sleep cycle. Some people are sensitive enough to fluctuations in the Earth's magnetism that it creates anxiety and depression (high magnetic activity hurts the output of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate your mood). Well, it looks like magnetism also controls whether you'll dream that you're merely flying or that you're in a cross-country skiing championship while giant man-roosters try to distract you with naked images of Willem Dafoe, who is also a cat for some reason.



Don't look down. We assure you the penis is regular human size.

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After recording his dreams for eight years, psychologist Darren Lipnicki stumbled upon this correlation: low geomagnetic activity means crazier dreams. When the magnetic field was high, his dreams made more sense, but when it died down, he was dreaming tripped-out things. As he describes it, "I was stranded on a foreign coastline with a monkey that spoke English and a woman that suddenly became small, almost doll-sized. Then I was at home."

For his study, Lipnicki devised a five-point scoring system to rate his dreams -- those with a rating of 1 were scenarios that seemed perfectly reasonable, but those that he rated a 5 were all flying toasters and monkey butlers.

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Take away the pants and this one goes straight to 4 on sheer principle.

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It would make sense if (as Lipnicki suspects) it's all about magnetism and melatonin. After all, people who take melatonin supplements say that they experience crazier dreams. This also leads to the conclusion that weird-ass dreams are the sign of a healthy brain -- your melatonin is doing its job.