What Your Dream Life Says About You

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What does a person’s dream life tell us about their waking life?

It’s a question that has concerned humans for thousands of years. In ancient civilizations like Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, dreams were often considered divine messages from the gods. Today, some psychologists probe deep for clues about a person’s subconscious concerns. While some people dream of snakes falling from the sky, others dream of running errands or repeatedly failing a math test. Many of us always remember our dreams, while others don’t remember anything at all.

Recently, a team of Italian dream researchers came together to see if they could identify patterns in dream content and memories related to cognitive and personality types and other factors. Together, they analyzed 3,366 dream reports from 207 adults collected between 2020 and 2024 using large linguistic models and compared this data to demographic, cognitive, psychometric, and sleep measures. What they found was that intense interest in dreams, a tendency of the mind to wander, and high-quality sleep were associated with both certain types of dream content and the ability to remember dream sequences and details. They published their results in Natural communications.

I spoke with co-author Valentina Elce about why some people have strange, vivid dreams, why dreams can be the guardians of sleep, what dreams can teach us about the nature of consciousness, and what happens to dream memory as we age.

Do you easily remember your dreams?

Basically, I always remember my dreams. Sometimes when I’m very stressed I have these dreams with mazes. I get lost in places. It’s funny because I associate getting lost in a maze with the anxiety of losing my direction in life. But sometimes I also have happy dreams, in which I dream of colorful nature scenes.

Why does the dreaming mind tend to be more narrative and cinematic than the waking mind?

There are many hypotheses. Mine is that sleep is a state in which the brain is more disconnected from the environment than wakefulness. So when we sleep, our brains are free to explore distant concepts and connections with minimal interference from the outside world. It is processing all the information that we have acquired during the day to allow us to learn new things, to consolidate our memories.

What differentiates people who have very realistic dreams from those who have more bizarre, surreal dreams?

We’ve noticed that, for example, people who tend to wander during the day tend to have more bizarre dreams, with more scene changes. They don’t necessarily dream of magical creatures, but the stories are rather less coherent. One of the main theories we have as to why is that the fragmented and bizarre dreams are a version of mind wandering, that there is some continuity there. We also notice in different studies that there are specific areas of the brain that are very active both during waking mind wandering and during fragmented dreams.

Additionally, people who report more vivid dreams tend to perceive their sleep as better. This is quite interesting, because it suggests that dreams are the guardians of sleep. A hypothesis first proposed by Freud is that having a vivid dream allows the brain to become more disconnected from the environment because we are immersed in these highly imaginative perceptual scenarios. The less connected we are to the external environment, the less likely we are to be awake. These very vivid dreams would then theoretically allow us to have better quality sleep.

Read more: “Does Dream Inception Work? »

What do we know about people who don’t remember their dreams?

First of all, not remembering your dreams does not mean that you are not dreaming. This is important because most of us dream most of the night. In studies we published last year, we found individual variables that predict whether a person might be more likely to remember their dreams than others. What we noticed is that there is a process of memory retrieval in dream recall that is quite important. For example, if you think about the process of recalling a dream, it’s quite difficult from a cognitive point of view because you have to wake up and ignore all the information that comes from the external environment, like the weather, the time, and the things you need to do during the day. You have to ignore all this information and focus on a very weak and fragile short-term memory.

What we noticed is that people who are better at ignoring incoming information and focusing on a very specific memory can remember more dreams. We used a famous cognitive test called the Stroop task, which is often used in neuropsychology to measure selective attention and the ability to suppress competing information.

Another thing we noticed is that sleep patterns are important for recall. People who tend to wake up a little later in the morning tend to remember more dreams. When we sleep, we go through different phases of sleep: REM and non-REM. Generally, REM sleep tends to accumulate late at night or in the morning. We’ve noticed that during REM sleep we tend to have more vivid dreams. Since REM is more common later in the morning, those who wake up later will be more likely to have and remember REM dreams.

Are certain personality types or cognitive traits associated with greater ease in remembering dreams?

Aside from mind wandering, people who place greater value on dreaming, who are more interested in their dreams, and who attribute greater importance to their dreams tend to remember their dreams more. But we don’t yet know which thing comes first. This is still an open question.

One possible interpretation is that if you remember your dreams more, you will become more interested in them. This is something I noticed in my study. We wanted to have as representative a sample as possible of the general population, so I recruited people who were not interested in dreams at all. They said to me, “Look, I’m going to do your experiment, but I really don’t care about dreams and I don’t remember my dreams.

What was funny was that when they were in the study, they remembered their dreams, and it surprised them and they were so happy. At the end of that experience, they came to me and said, “I’m shocked. I can’t believe I’m really dreaming.” Even months after the experience, I still receive messages from some of my participants who now remember their dreams. They think of me when they remember their dreams.

Does dream memory change over the course of a person’s life, as they age?

Dream recall declines with age, for different reasons. There is a cognitive decline which is entirely physiological. As we age, it becomes more difficult to remember our dreams. With aging, sleep patterns are also disrupted, which affects dreams. You sometimes have more fragmented sleep, but you also wake up earlier, which means you might have less REM sleep, and therefore less vivid dreams.

We also noticed that younger people tended to daydream more about everyday life and their daily schedules. In their dream reports, they tended to refer more to timing, with words like tomorrow, yesterday, and next week. This probably reflects our daily experiences. When we are young, when we are at university and when we work, our life is strongly dependent on a schedule which can be very busy.

What do your findings tell us about the possible evolutionary function of dreams?

We are still discussing the possible biological function. Some people believe that dreams are actually just random brain noises, a byproduct of sleep. But I believe we are meant to dream, that dreams allow us to learn from present and past experiences. One of the functions of dreams appears to be the processing of emotions and the consolidation of memory.

For example, we sometimes dream about colleagues we met years ago in different scenarios and contexts, which allows us to create new connections in the brain. Memory consolidation requires emotional processing because every memory has an emotional tone. By elaborating these experiences in different contexts that are much more perceptual and immersive, we can get rid of some of the emotional burden and consolidate them into our general culture. This is my interpretation.

What can dreams tell us about the nature of consciousness?

This is a very important question, because dreams are an excellent model of consciousness. The definition of dreams is the conscious experiences we have while we sleep. So this is a time when we are both conscious and yet not fully aware of the external environment. Dreams allow us to study the phenomenology of consciousness in a cleaner way. It is also interesting to study what happens when participants wake up. We wake them up and ask them what was going through their minds, and sometimes they say they weren’t experiencing anything.

Do you remember your dreams more now than before you studied dreaming?

Yes, absolutely. This is one of the good and bad things about my job. As a scientist, you start by observing the world. I observe my dreams and begin to wonder how dreams work. I am always my first subject.