Why do some dreams feel vivid and lifelike, while others are confusing or hard to remember? New research from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca suggests that the answer lies in a mix of personal traits and shared life experiences, both of which influence what we see and feel while we sleep.
The study, published in Communications Psychology, examined more than 3,700 reports describing both dreams and waking experiences from 287 participants between the ages of 18 and 70. Over the course of two weeks, participants kept daily records of their experiences. At the same time, researchers collected detailed data on sleep habits, cognitive skills, personality traits, and psychological profiles.
AI Reveals Hidden Structure in Dreams
To analyze this large dataset, researchers used advanced natural language processing (NLP) tools. These methods allowed them to study the meaning and structure of dream descriptions in a systematic way. The results showed that dreams are not random or chaotic. Instead, they reflect a complex interaction between individual characteristics, such as a tendency to mind-wander, interest in dreams, and sleep quality, and external influences, including major societal events like the COVID-19 pandemic.
By comparing how participants described their daily experiences and their dreams, the researchers found that the brain does not simply replay waking life during sleep. Instead, it reshapes those experiences. Familiar settings like workplaces, hospitals, or schools are not reproduced exactly. They are reimagined into vivid and immersive scenes that often combine different elements and shift perspectives in unexpected ways.
This process suggests that dreams actively reconstruct reality rather than passively reflect it. The brain blends memories with imagined or anticipated events, creating new and sometimes surreal scenarios.
Personality and Life Events Influence Dream Style
Not everyone dreams in the same way. People who tend to mind-wander more often reported dreams that were fragmented and constantly changing. In contrast, those who place greater importance on dreams and believe they have meaning tended to experience richer and more immersive dream environments.
The study also examined how large-scale events affect dreaming. Data collected during the COVID-19 lockdown by researchers at Sapienza University of Rome, and later compared with findings from the IMT team, showed that dreams during lockdown were more emotionally intense and frequently included themes of restriction and limitation. As time passed and people adapted, these patterns gradually faded, suggesting that dream content evolves alongside psychological adjustment to major life changes.
Dreams Reflect a Dynamic Mental Process
“Our findings show that dreams are not just a reflection of past experiences, but a dynamic process shaped by who we are and what we live through,” explains Valentina Elce, researcher at the IMT School and lead author of the paper. “By combining large-scale data with computational methods, we were able to uncover patterns in dream content that were previously difficult to detect.”
AI Opens New Doors for Dream Research
The study also highlights how artificial intelligence can advance the study of dreams. NLP models were able to capture the meaning and structure of dream reports with a level of accuracy similar to that of human evaluators. This approach could make it easier to study topics like consciousness, memory, and mental health on a larger and more consistent scale.
This research was supported by a grant from the BIAL Foundation (#091/2020) and by the TweakDreams ERC Starting Grant (#948891). The work was carried out at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in collaboration with researchers from Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Camerino.