The dreams people remember each morning may not be random stories created by a sleeping brain after all. New research suggests they are shaped by a combination of personality, sleep habits and even major events happening in the outside world.
Researchers at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca analysed more than 3,700 reports describing dreams and waking experiences from 287 adults aged between 18 and 70. Over a two-week period, participants kept daily records while also providing information about their sleep patterns, personality traits, cognitive abilities and psychological characteristics.
The findings were published in the journal Communications Psychology.
Using natural language processing, a form of artificial intelligence that analyses written language, the researchers examined how dream narratives differed from descriptions of everyday life. Rather than finding evidence that dreams simply replay daily experiences, they discovered the brain appears to reorganise familiar memories into entirely new situations.
Ordinary places such as workplaces, schools, and hospitals frequently reappeared in dreams, but often merged with unrelated locations or altered perspectives. The findings suggest the sleeping brain combines memories, emotions, and imagined possibilities to create new experiences instead of replaying reality exactly as it happened.
The study also found that individual differences influenced the way people dream. Participants who reported frequent mind-wandering while awake were more likely to describe dreams that shifted rapidly between scenes and ideas. By contrast, people who attached greater personal importance to dreams tended to report richer, more immersive dream experiences.
Researchers also examined dream reports collected during COVID-19 lockdowns and found recurring themes of restriction, confinement, and stronger emotions. Those themes became less common over time, suggesting that dreams may reflect how people psychologically adapt to major shared experiences.
The team believes artificial intelligence could help transform dream research by allowing scientists to analyse thousands of dream reports consistently, something that would be extremely difficult through manual interpretation alone.
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