Hypnagogia, the transition from wakefulness to sleep, involves dreams that forge connections among unrelated concepts, potentially boosting creativity, learning, and memory. Mind-wandering, a form of spontaneous thought, may rely on similar processes. This study tested a new tool called Dormio Light to cue and index hypnagogic dream content remotely, cheaply, and quickly. In 80 participants (34 female), the tool successfully cued specific thought content (e.g., a tree) during hypnagogia and mind-wandering, with incubation rates matching lab studies. Phenomenological differences emerged between the two states. The tool offers a practical way to study these cognitive states and their relationship.
Variation in dream affect (valence and arousal) is associated with changes in topical content and semantic structure. Positively valenced dreams exhibit more coherent, structured, and linear narratives, while negatively valenced dreams have more narrative loops and dominant topics. High arousal dreams are structurally dominated by few high arousal topics and incoherent topical connections, whereas low arousal dreams contain more loops. These findings suggest that affective processes are associated with both the content and structure of dreams. The study combined word embedding, topic modeling, and network analysis on over 18,000 dream reports from the DreamBank corpus, using Discourse Atom Topic Modeling to represent latent themes as a sparse dictionary of topics and identify their affective associations.