Communications Psychology
April 28, 2026
Valentina Elce, Giorgia Bontempi, Serena Scarpelli et al.
Dreams are universal yet highly idiosyncratic experiences. While memories and personal concerns are known to influence dream content, how such influences evolve over time and how stable individual traits shape dreaming remain unclear. Here, we systematically quantified the semantic structure of dreams in a large, multimodal dataset comprising 3366 reports of dreams and waking experiences...
PLoS Biology
March 1, 2026
Adriana Michalak, Davide Marzoli, Francesco Pietrogiacomi et al.
Perceived sleep depth is a key determinant of subjective sleep quality, traditionally thought to reflect unconsciousness and reduced cortical activation. Here, we combined high-density EEG with a serial awakening paradigm during NREM2 (N2) sleep in healthy human participants to examine its neural and experiential correlates. As expected, deeper sleep was associated with reduced cortical...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
September 8, 2025
Adriana Michalak, Davide Marzoli, Francesco Pietrogiacomi et al.
preprint
Perceived sleep depth is a key determinant of subjective sleep quality, traditionally thought to reflect unconsciousness and reduced cortical activation. Here, we combined high-density EEG with a serial awakening paradigm during NREM sleep to examine its neural and experiential correlates. As expected, deeper sleep was associated with reduced cortical activation, reflected in a lower...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
May 21, 2025
Valentina Elce, Giorgia Bontempi, Serena Scarpelli et al.
1 citation
preprint
Dreams are universal yet deeply personal experiences. While memory and personal concerns influence dream content, the impact of other individual, generalizable traits remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we built a multimodal dataset including dream and wakefulness reports, alongside demographic, psychometric, cognitive, and sleep-related measures in a large adult cohort. Natural...
Communications Psychology
February 18, 2025
Valentina Elce, Damiana Bergamo, Giorgia Bontempi et al.
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...
bioRxiv
June 27, 2024
Claudia Picard-Deland, Mahdad Jafarzadeh Esfahani, Leila Anna Christina Salvesen et al.
preprint
Lucid dreaming occurs when one is aware of dreaming while asleep. While lucid dreaming can occur spontaneously, it remains rare. This multi-center study (Netherlands, Italy, Canada) tested a combined induction approach integrating senses-initiated lucid dreaming (SSILD) with targeted lucidity reactivation in a large sample of participants with varying lucid dreaming experience. Sixty...