Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Far from being videos of our lives that are replayed in sleep, dreams are actually interpretations of what we experience in the waking world.
• Researchers gathered dream data from two groups of participants, a main group and a group who recorded what they dreamed of during the COVID-19 lockdown.
• Using AI to analyze data from the recordings, they found out that everything from emotional events to the tendency for your mind to wander can influence dreams.

Those weird dreams you sometimes have aren’t just neurons firing aimlessly inside your brain at night. Although they may warp reality into something half-familiar and wholly bizarre, mounting evidence suggests that dreams are actually mirroring your personality traits and lived experiences. As you fall into the deepest phase of sleep, the way your experiences transform into strange movie reels in your subconscious is anything but random. In fact, your most vivid and memorable dreams are the ones with the deepest connection to your daily life and personality traits.

New research from a team of neuroscientists led by Valentina Else of the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy, documented many unexpected connections between dream contents and waking life. The study analyzed recorded dream reports and compared the visions in dreams to data about individuals’ personality traits, psychological profiles, cognitive skills, and sleep habits. Else used AI models known as natural language processing tools to get to the bottom of dream structures and descriptions. And it turns out your brain isn’t just replaying the past. Dreaming is more of a dynamic process that merges lived experience with who you are.

“Relative to waking reports, dreams shifted from self-referential, thought-centered narratives to perceptual experiences dominated by visuo-spatial details, multiple characters, and bizarre events,” Else said in the study, which was recently published in Communications Psychology. “Stable traits, including attitude toward dreaming, mind-wandering propensity, and subjective sleep quality, selectively influenced dream content.”

Thus dreaming is related to waking life but is influenced by additional factors. Widespread events or phenomena such as the COVID-19 lockdown can also influence the dreams of many people, at least for the duration of the event. The researchers studied 217 subjects who ranged in age from 18 to 70 years old, had regular sleep patterns, and had not been diagnosed with any neurological, psychiatric, or sleep-related conditions. COVID-19 lockdown dream data was gathered from 100 participants who met those criteria and volunteered through social media. The subjects recorded daily reports of their dreams from April 28–May 11, 2020, which covered a week of strict lockdown and a subsequent week of fewer restrictions. Participants in both the main and lockdown studies responded to questions about the perceived meaning and significance of their dreams.

Using information from these cognitive tests and questionnaires, Else was able to create profiles of characteristics that were either known or thought to affect dreams. Personal attitudes towards dreams (such as a persistent fear of nightmares) may positively or negatively influence what someone dreams about. Memory and executive functions are behind the encoding of experiences and how those experiences are reconfigured in dreams. The ability to create visual imagery controls how vivid and detailed dreams are. Another important factor was how prone someone is to letting their mind wander, since that tends to make spontaneous thoughts appear in both waking and dreaming states.

To see how what influence waking experiences could possibly have on dreams, participants were asked to record what their last experience was at random times while awake. AI analyzed each recording to classify dream structures and experiences. Among the aspects of dreams that the AI models were looking for were abstract thoughts or reasoning, emotions, social interactions, physical spaces, change of setting, chronological aspects, active or passive experiences, implied movements, restricted actions, bodily functions or instincts, references to the experiment itself, and anything strange or illogical. Visual, tactile, and auditory experiences were also analyzed.

Else’s team found that dreams tend to be reinterpretations of experiences from waking life. Having a positive attitude towards dreaming means a greater chance of waking up with the perception of just having experienced a dream. People with more interest in dreams tend to remember details better and to have dreams that are vivid and immersive. If your mind has the tendency to wander while you’re awake, you may find yourself having more bizarre dreams, which arise from spontaneous thoughts without any external influence. Stressful events with a heavy emotional weight can also affect dreams. Dreams recorded during lockdown were more likely to reflect restrictions or trauma.

“These results bridge longstanding gaps between phenomenological dream research and cognitive neuroscience,” Else said. “By integrating advanced computational tools with established neuroscientific and psychological frameworks, dream research may thus move toward a more comprehensive and reproducible understanding of the mind’s generative activity during sleep.