bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
May 21, 2025
Valentina Elce, Giorgia Bontempi, Serena Scarpelli et al.
1 citation
preprint
Dreams are shaped by both stable individual traits and major external events. A large adult cohort provided dream and wakefulness reports alongside demographic, psychometric, cognitive, and sleep measures. Natural language processing revealed semantic features that distinguish dream from wakefulness reports, with this distinction significantly modulated by individual-specific factors. Longitudinal and cross-sample analyses showed that the COVID-19 pandemic left lasting traces on dream content. The findings highlight a dynamic interplay between personal characteristics and external events in shaping dream experiences, offering insights into the cognitive and emotional architecture of dreaming.
Communications Psychology
April 28, 2026
Valentina Elce, Giorgia Bontempi, Serena Scarpelli et al.
Dreams are universal yet highly personal. By analyzing 3,366 reports of dreams and waking experiences from 207 adults collected between 2020 and 2024, along with demographic, cognitive, psychometric, and sleep measures, researchers found that dreams differ from waking thoughts: they are less self-referential and thought-centered, and more perceptual, dominated by visuo-spatial details, multiple characters, and bizarre events. Stable traits like attitude toward dreaming, mind-wandering propensity, and subjective sleep quality selectively influenced dream content. During the first 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, dreams from an independent dataset of 80 participants showed increased references to limitations and heightened emotional intensity, which gradually normalized over subsequent years. Stable individual traits and incidental experiences jointly shape dream semantics.
Communications Psychology
February 18, 2025
Valentina Elce, Damiana Bergamo, Giorgia Bontempi et al.
Dream recall varies widely between people and across nights. In 217 healthy adults aged 18 to 70, attitude toward dreaming, tendency to mind-wander, and sleep patterns were associated with whether a person reported a dream upon waking. The likelihood of recalling dream content was predicted by age and vulnerability to interference. Night-to-night changes in sleep patterns and seasonal fluctuations also influenced dream recall. These findings help explain why some people remember dreams more often than others and why recall varies within the same person.
Valentina Elce, Damiana Bergamo, Giorgia Bontempi et al.
preprint
Dream recall varies greatly between people and across nights. In a study of 204 healthy adults aged 18 to 70, attitude toward dreaming, tendency to mind-wander, and sleep patterns were associated with how likely someone was to report a dream upon waking. The probability of recalling specific dream content was predicted by age and vulnerability to interference. Dream recall also fluctuated with nightly changes in sleep patterns and showed seasonal variation. These findings help explain why dream recall differs both between individuals and within the same person over time.