A Light in the Dark: The Truth Behind Nightmares

You turn down the dark alley when a shadowy figure emerges from a corner. Suddenly, they start to  chase you and while sprinting for your life you trip and fall! But then you wake up.

We’ve all experienced a nightmare at least once in our life, but even if you’ve never been chased by a murderer or had your teeth fall out in real life, they still occur. So what does it all mean? Turns out, nightmares might not be as complicated as you think.

What Are Dreams?

Dreams are the thoughts, visions, and sensations we experience as we sleep. They are often misinterpreted as being visions of things that haven’t happened when in reality 99% of them reflect what has already occurred. Some possibilities of their purpose are:

1. Arrangement of info in the brain

Your brain decodes everything seen during the day, placing it in your long term memory and coding it in a way it can understand. This is why most dreams are just fragments and reflections of what happened during your day.

2. Training survival skills

During an experiment where a rat was prevented from dreaming, it lost its ability to perform normal survival activities. Dreams may be used to rehearse survival skills. Continue reading →

Swallowing watermelon seeds will grow a plant in your stomach, swimming right after eating will make you cramp and drown; these are myths we heard throughout our childhoods before we grew up and realized they were false. Or are they? Well those ones might have been, but some urban legends have surprisingly turned out to be true, so let’s take a look:

1. Kidney theft

The Myth: A businessman goes on a trip and in the hotel lobby bar he meets a beautiful woman who offers to buy him a drink. Later, they go back to his room where he suddenly passes out. The next morning, with no recollection of what happened and a severe pain in his back, he realizes his kidney has been cleanly and professionally removed.

The Truth: What may sound like a case of a ridiculously bad hangover actually happened to several hundred men in India. One, in particular, was Naseem Mohammed, 25, a laborer who was desperate for work when he was offered a 3 month painting contract.

He was placed in a house for two weeks, being well fed the entire time as they stalled the job, so he had no reason to be suspicious. After being persuaded to give a blood sample, he was injected and woke up in a hospital with the same pain and scar as the man from the myth.

The culprit was found to be a group of doctors who were running an illegal organ selling business where they supplied human kidneys to the wealthy Indians and foreigners. They were said to be led by Dr. Amit Kumar who was later arrested in 2008.

2. Killer in the backseat

The Myth: A woman is driving home late when a vehicle tailgating behind her continuously flashing their lights at her backseat. When she finally gets home terrified, she realizes there was an escaped murderer about to kill her from the backseat and the other driver was trying to warn her. And thus began a now incredibly cliché horror movie trope.

The Truth: Widely thought to have originated in New York in 1964 when an unsuspecting police officer found a man hiding in the back of his car.  After recognizing him as a dangerous killer, he shot him dead.

A similar incident happened in Chicago in 2013. As a woman went in to pay at the gas station, a man snuck into her unlocked minivan. When she returned, he assaulted her and forced her to drive to an ATM to steal her cash. So remember, always lock your car doors when you’re not around.

3. Body under the bed

The Myth: A honeymooning couple checks into their motel and becomes aware of a horrible odor so bad that they ask to switch rooms. The hotel is fully booked so they send a maid to thoroughly clean the room, but when the couple returns the smell persists. They tear the room apart eventually pulling the mattress off the box spring where they find a woman’s corpse. What happens in Vegas, right?

The Truth: In 2010, 28 year old Sony Millbrook went missing after being last seen at a motel in Memphis. After missing payments, the staff removed her things and cleaned the room to be rented out again. Her family insisted on searching the room but the staff refused and eventually her body was found under the box spring two months later.

Her boyfriend was later found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for the murder. In that time, the motel had rented the room to others so people had unsuspectingly slept within inches of the decaying body. I’m sure they’ll give every hotel room they ever stay in a thorough sweep before spending the night again.

4. Someone inside the house

The Myth: A teenage babysitter is watching TV when the phone rings and a man at the other end tells her to check on the children upstairs. When she asks who it is they hang up, and she ignores it as a harmless prank.

When he calls again saying the same thing, she gets worried and calls the police who tell her they will trace the next call. Again he calls so the police trace it only to discover he is inside the house with the children.

The Truth: Thirteen year old Janett Christman was babysitting a 3 year old boy in Columbia, Missouri on March 18, 1950. Around 10:30pm, police received a call from a young girl hysterically screaming right before the line went dead. No one could identify who called because no one was manning the switchboard at the time.

When the child’s parents came back around 1:30am they were horrified to find the house ransacked with Janett’s body in a pool of blood on the floor. She had been strangled with a wire, hit over the head and stabbed with a mechanical pencil several times.

The initial suspect was a local man who had been known to carry a mechanical pencil around and had an interest in Janett, but inexplicably there was little cooperation with the police so he was never convicted and her case remains unsolved to this day.

5. The Realistic Halloween Decoration

The Myth: A lifelike Halloween decoration of a person being hanged turns out to be a real person hanging from a tree.

The Truth: In 2005, a 42 year old woman in Frederica, Delaware hung herself from a tree a few nights before Halloween. Passersby thought it was a prop and admired its realism, until a few days later when someone inspected it closely and noticed it was real.

Urban legends sound realistic because of their plausibility to actually happen and judging by these stories, it’s hard to deny that. Maybe the next time someone tells you an old scary story it might be more true than you thought.

This article was written by The Hearty Soul. The Hearty Soul is a rapidly growing community dedicated to helping you discover your most healthy, balanced, and natural life.

Sources:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-urban-legend-of-the-governments-mindcontrolling-arcade-game

http://www.cracked.com/article_15628_the-5-creepiest-urban-legends-that-happen-to-be-true.html

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9841877

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/world/asia/30kidney.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVNUXDfLanA

The United Nations recently estimated that by 2050 the global population could reach a staggering nine billion. As it stands, there are vast numbers of people who are unable to find enough food for themselves and their family. The situation is already unsustainable, and if we continue to consume food in the way we do in the West the situation is only likely to get worse.

Our gluttonous diets, which have led to unprecedented levels of health issues, have also led us to the brink of humanitarian and environmental catastrophe. The over-consumption of beef and pork means that of the 78 million acres of rainforest that are chopped down every year, around half is for livestock grazing, which is the greatest contributor of greenhouse gasses. Our dietary habits have to change.

There is one solution that has been backed by nearly every governing body charged with the question of sustainability – eat bugs. Just reading the sentence is enough to make most people shudder and recoil. However, incorporating insects into our diet is not only good for the planet, but it is also great for our health. So why is there such a strong stigma against doing so?

Cultural perceptions

Eating insects and other invertebrates is nothing new. From the time of the first human beings, we have eaten bugs as part of our diet. Even today, over two billion people regularly consume invertebrates in their meals. It is largely the cultures of far-east Asia, Africa, and Central America that continue the practice, where some ‘creepy crawlies’ are actually eaten as a delicacy.

In western society, we moved away from eating insects regularly around 10,000 BC when the earliest known form of agriculture began in the Middle East. The region has become known historically as the ‘fertile crescent’ due to its link to early farming and its favorable weather conditions, in comparison with humanity’s ancestral home in Africa.

As our species began farming, bugs shifted from being  a delicious part of our diet to being a farmer’s greatest pest became a culturally held view. No longer tied to having to hunt and gather, agriculture turned us away from our insectivore roots, as we sought to protect the plants that we grew and the animals we ate.

Without the need to eat bugs, and as we continued to push our society on in the name of progress, insects shifted even lower in our cultural opinion, moving from unwelcome pest to abhorrent vermin. For many of us, the idea of crunching down on an insect is detestable. Continue reading →

Forests cover nearly one third of the world’s land area, with nearly all forests inhabited by indigenous and rural communities. Beyond the importance of them as living quarters, forests are sacred to our overall ecosystem, environmental biome, animal habitat, and spiritual relief – to name a few.

With the threat of deforestation and environmental degradation, the stakes of reflecting and contemplating all that forests give to us, both on an individual and community level, are high.

In no particular order, here are the top ten reasons why forests truly matter…

They Absorb and Store Carbon

Forests are an integral member of the earth’s climate system. By growing trees in vast numbers, dangerous CO2 is effectively absorbed from the atmosphere and stored in their trunks, leaves, roots and forest soil. In effect, keeping humans alive and the natural ecosystem vital.

Provide Jobs and Livelihood

In the world, over 1.6 billion of the population depends on forests in some fashion for their livelihood, with a whopping 60 million indigenous people wholly dependent on forests for basic survival needs.

To boot, roughly 10 million of the world’s population is employed by forest management and conservation.

Affords Wood for Furniture, Firewood, and Other Products

In total, roughly 30 percent of the world’s forests are used for the production of wood and non-wood products. Evidently, wood is an integral element to the upkeep of lifestyles throughout the world – both in imminent necessity, such as medications, to utilitarian purposes, such furniture and firewood. Continue reading →

Sugar is a highly addictive substance that can create an acid environment in your body that can lead to inflammation, illness, and chronic diseases. According to one study sugar is 8 times more addictive than cocaine because it stimulates our brain the same way drugs do.

This is why we often get those cravings that lead us to the nearest convenience store and we end up with ice cream, candy bars, or a sugary drink.

Resisting these foods, especially if we have been on them for a good portion of our lives is extremely difficult.

I have struggled with sugar addictions for years and I have learned some things that have helped me not only to control my sugar cravings but set up my life in a way that I almost never want sugar.

Think of your path as a series of baby steps and micro-commitments. If you are trying to go for a dramatic overnight transformation where you don’t self-sabotage after 4-6 days then you really need to look into working more closely with your subconscious and or change your environment completely.

Otherwise, you may not be able to maintain the change.

If you are not ready for an overnight cure but still want to change your life then set tiny goals that you can commit to for 30-60 days at a time until they become part of who you are. You would be surprised how often tiny changes completely transform your life over a year.

Now let’s dive into sugar.

1. Start your day with a glass of warm lemon water.

If you want to help your body change its craving patterns then you need to support it with the right nutrients to ease the transition. Starting your day off with a glass of lukewarm lemon water is a good place to start because it can help stimulate digestion, keep the kidneys healthy, aid in detoxing the body while also keeping the blood sugar levels from spiking.

I like to take half a lemon and squeeze it into a glass of water in the morning and sip it while I am waking up. Yes, it will be a bit tart but just visualize it cleansing your body from head to toe, because it is. Continue reading →