Dreams, reality and memory: confabulations in lucid dreamers implicate reality-monitoring dysfunction in dream consciousness.
Cognitive Neuropsychiatry January 1, 2014 P R Corlett, S V Canavan, L Nahum et al.
People who report high dream awareness show a more liberal acceptance bias on a reality-monitoring task, meaning they are more likely to mistake familiar but irrelevant information for current reality. This pattern resembles confabulatory memory errors seen after damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a brain region previously linked to dreaming. The findings suggest overlap in how dreams, imagination, and reality are perceived, with implications for understanding reality monitoring and psychosis.