SLEEP Advances
September 4, 2026
Henderson S Holder, Erin J Wamsley
Abstract Sleep and dreaming have long been hypothesized to serve a functional role in emotion regulation. Here, we investigated how reactivating highly emotional autobiographical memories prior to sleep affects dream content and subsequent emotional appraisal of these memories. Participants (N = 42) completed the Autobiographical Emotional Memory Task (AEMT) prior to bed for three consecutive...
SLEEP Advances
2026
Tony J. Cunningham, Erin J. Wamsley, JD Payne
For the last few decades, Dr. Robert “Bob” Stickgold has led the way in reshaping our understanding of sleep through his influential studies and theoretical frameworks. His work has established sleep as an active component of memory consolidation, in which reactivation and dreaming foster the selective stabilization, abstraction, and integration of waking experiences, optimizing our cognitive...
Nature Communications
August 13, 2025
William Wong, Rubén Herzog, Kátia Cristine Andrade et al.
10 citations
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
SLEEP Advances
2025
Chadwick C Frost, Erin J. Wamsley
1 citation
Abstract People frequently dream of recent experiences, which may reflect the consolidation of memories in the sleeping brain. Many studies demonstrate that experimentally introducing new learning prior to sleep can induce dreams of recently encoded memories. Here, for the first time, we tested whether activating a remote memory just before sleep can similarly induce participants to dream about...
Sleep
April 20, 2024
Chadwick C Frost, Taya Middleton, Erin J. Wamsley
Abstract Introduction Completing a learning task just before sleep often induces task-related dreams. This is thought to reflect the consolidation of recently formed memories in the sleeping brain. However, this literature has focused almost exclusively on how recent experiences newly introduced before sleep are incorporated into dreams. It is unknown whether and how remote memories may also be...
SLEEP Advances
2024
Erin J. Wamsley, Tempest Trost, Matthew A. Tucker
2 citations
Robert Stickgold's research was among the earliest to rigorously quantify the effect of learning on dream content. As a result, we learned that dreaming is influenced by the activation of newly formed memory traces in the sleeping brain. Exactly how this happens is an ongoing area of investigation. Here, we test the hypothesis that participants are especially likely to dream of recent...
Sleep
December 11, 2023
Lauren Hudachek, Erin J. Wamsley
Abstract The frequent appearance of newly learned information in dreams suggests that dream content is influenced by memory consolidation. Many studies have tested this hypothesis by asking whether dreaming about a learning task is associated with improved memory, but results have been inconsistent. We conducted a meta-analysis to determine the strength of the association between...
May 16, 2023
William Wong, Kátia C. Andrade, Thomas Andrillon et al.
21 citations
preprint
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
PLoS One
March 22, 2022
Erin J. Wamsley
22 citations
Memories of the past help us adaptively respond to similar situations in the future. Originally described by Schacter & Addis in 2007, the "constructive episodic simulation" hypothesis proposes that waking thought combines fragments of various past episodes into imagined simulations of events that may occur in the future. This same framework may be useful for understanding the function of...
Psychophysiology
July 1, 2019
Jing Zhang, Erin J. Wamsley
The stream of human consciousness persists during sleep, albeit in altered form. Disconnected from external input, the mind and brain remain active, at times creating the bizarre sequences of thought and imagery that comprise "dreaming." Yet despite substantial effort toward understanding this unique state of consciousness, no reliable neurophysiological indicator of dreaming has been...
Journal of Sleep Research
February 1, 2019
Erin J. Wamsley, Robert Stickgold
Sleep following learning benefits memory. One model attributes this effect to the iterative "reactivation" of memory traces in the sleeping brain, demonstrated in animal models. Although technical limitations prohibit using the same methods to observe memory reactivation in the human brain, the study of mental activity during sleep provides an alternative method of observing memory activation...
Oxford Handbooks Online
April 5, 2018
Erin J. Wamsley
Dreaming has often been viewed as a “mysterious” experience entirely distinct from waking cognition. An alternative view proposes that dreams are generated by the same fundamental processes that give rise to spontaneous thought during wakefulness. New evidence suggests that these processes include activity of the brain’s memory systems, supporting consolidation of newly encoded experience....
Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports
March 1, 2014
Erin J. Wamsley
Converging evidence suggests that dreaming is influenced by the consolidation of memory during sleep. Following encoding, recently formed memory traces are gradually stabilized and reorganized into a more permanent form of long-term storage. Sleep provides an optimal neurophysiological state to facilitate this process, allowing memory networks to be repeatedly reactivated in the absence of new...
Sleep
February 1, 2014
Erin J. Wamsley, Claire E H M Donjacour, Thomas E Scammell et al.
We investigated a generally unappreciated feature of the sleep disorder narcolepsy, in which patients mistake the memory of a dream for a real experience and form sustained delusions about significant events. We interviewed patients with narcolepsy and healthy controls to establish the prevalence of this complaint and identify its predictors. Academic medical centers in Boston, Massachusetts...
Sleep
2010
Erin J. Wamsley, Karen Perry, Ina Djonlagic et al.
Studies of neural activity in animals and humans suggest that experiences are "replayed" in cortical and hippocampal networks during NREM sleep. Here, we examine whether memory reactivation in sleeping humans might also be evident within reports of concomitant subjective experience (i.e., dreaming). Participants were trained on an engaging visuomotor learning task across a period of one or more...
heiDOK (Heidelberg University)
2008
Erin J. Wamsley, John S. Antrobus
2 citations
It has long been known that dream recall, along with various other features of dreaming, changes as a function of time of night. Yet the processes which might account for these time-dependent variations remain obscure. Here we assess the contribution of homeostatic and circadian factors to the generation of NREM mentation across the diurnal cycle. Assuming that previously reported time-of-night...