Frontiers in Psychology
August 18, 2015
Josie E Malinowski, Caroline L. Horton
87 citations
Sleep and dreaming serve an emotion assimilation function. Emotions mark waking-life memories for selective processing during sleep, leading to consolidation into long-term memory and integration into existing memory networks. Dreaming reflects these assimilation processes, and the associations between memory fragments activated during sleep produce measurable dream metaphor and hyperassociativity. These are direct phenomenological experiences of emotional memory assimilation during sleep. The paper synthesizes sleep and dream research, arguing that dream science data can enhance theories of sleep function, and sleep-dependent memory research can improve understanding of dreaming.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 27, 2024
Anthony Bloxham, Caroline L. Horton
11 citations
The link between dreaming and sleep-dependent memory consolidation remains unclear, with mixed empirical results partly due to the elusive nature of dreams and methodological inconsistencies. This paper critically examines common assumptions and practices in this research area, offering a theoretical synthesis of existing models and evidence. It recommends using Targeted Memory Reactivation (TMR) to investigate whether dream content can be tied to specific cued memory activations. Additional suggestions focus on improving research methods and clarifying why and how researchers search for memory sources in dreams, and what function, if any, those sources might serve.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
July 17, 2020
Caroline L. Horton
7 citations
Lucid dreaming (LD) is often misunderstood by the public as the ability to control dream content and plot, but it is actually defined simply as being aware that one is dreaming while dreaming. This commentary explains and corrects that misconception and proposes definitions for key concepts in lucid and non-lucid dreaming related to control, cognition, and consciousness. Although these concepts may appear to overlap, they are underpinned by independent processes and experiences.
Emerging topics in life sciences
December 22, 2023
Caroline L. Horton
Dreaming is closely linked to REM sleep, which features intense emotional activation, reduced frontal-lobe activity, and increased dopamine and acetylcholine—patterns that match typical dream qualities like fear, reduced reality monitoring, bizarreness, and hyperassociativity. The default mode network provides a way to understand dreaming independently of REM sleep, and electroencephalography paired with serial awakenings shows that high-frequency activity in posterior brain regions may be associated with dreaming. However, all measures of dreaming depend on recall processes, so understanding dreaming requires addressing memory's crucial role in producing dream reports.
Frontiers in Psychiatry
January 1, 2017
Caroline L. Horton
The continuity hypothesis suggests that waking and dreaming mentation are connected, with emotionally salient waking experiences often appearing in dreams. However, discontinuities between waking and dreaming have been dismissed as errors or anomalies. This paper argues that disruptions of consciousness are equally common in waking cognition and that sleep-dependent memory consolidation of autobiographical experiences can explain some discontinuities in dreaming. Drawing on evidence of memory incorporation, fragmentation, and reorganization within dreams, the paper proposes that fragmentation of autobiographical and episodic memories during sleep, as part of consolidation, makes salient aspects of those memories available for retrieval isolated from their context. Thus, discontinuity in sleep is functional and normal.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 2014
Caroline L. Horton
People who often remember their dreams tend to be more open, have thinner psychological boundaries, and are prone to fantasy, according to two experiments. In the first experiment with 221 participants, these personality traits correlated with dream recall as measured by a validated questionnaire. A second experiment with 45 participants showed that the tendency to confabulate—confusing imagination with reality and creating false memories—was linked to awareness of dreaming, but not to other memory scores. This suggests that dream recall reflects a constructive, autobiographical memory process prone to error, rather than accurate memory, and warns that freely recalled dreams should be interpreted with caution.