Dreams are like windows into the mind, reflecting daily memories, beliefs, and concerns, while playing an essential role in learning, memory consolidation, and even our mental and physical health. Although almost everyone dreams, the ability to recall these experiences varies greatly from person to person. Research led by Giulio Bernardi sought to better understand this phenomenon by analysing the factors that influence dream recall. To do this, the team used a multimodal database that collected dream reports, personal characteristics, and cognitive, psychometric, and neurophysiological measures. The results point to three main factors that determine whether a person wakes up with the memory of the dream experience: attitude towards dreams, tendency to mind-wander, and sleep patterns. Additionally, the ability to recall dream details depends on resistance to interference and age. Interestingly, similar sleep patterns seem to favour both dreams with content and so-called "white dreams" - those we know we had, but whose content escapes us. This suggests that white dreams are real experiences, whose memories simply disappear upon waking. This study reinforces the idea that dreams are shaped by individual and momentary factors, opening new perspectives to understand their connection with memory and the human mind. This study was supported by the BIAL Foundation, in the scope of the research project 91/20 - Mentation report analysis across distinct states of consciousness: A linguistic approach, and published in the journal Communications Psychology - Nature, in the article The individual determinants of morning dream recall | Communications Psychology.
ABSTRACT
Evidence suggests that (almost) everyone dreams during their sleep and may actually do so for a large part of the night. Yet, dream recall shows large interindividual variability. Understanding the factors that influence dream recall is crucial for advancing our knowledge regarding dreams’ origin, significance, and functions. Here, we tackled this issue by prospectively collecting dream reports along with demographic information and psychometric, cognitive, actigraphic, and electroencephalographic measures in 217 healthy adults (18–70 y, 116 female participants, 101 male participants). We found that attitude towards dreaming, proneness to mind wandering, and sleep patterns are associated with the probability of reporting a dream upon morning awakening. The likelihood of recalling dream content was predicted by age and vulnerability to interference. Moreover, dream recall appeared to be influenced by night-by-night changes in sleep patterns and showed seasonal fluctuations. Our results provide an account for previous observations regarding inter- and intra-individual variability in morning dream recall.
