Memory updating in dreams
SLEEP Advances January 1, 2024 Erin J. Wamsley, Tempest Trost, Matthew A. Tucker 2 citations
Dreaming is influenced by the activation of newly formed memory traces in the sleeping brain, but how this happens is still being investigated. In a study testing whether people dream of recent experiences that overlap with well-established semantic networks, participants received new information about a favorite celebrity. Their dream content was tracked across three consecutive nights, and they were asked about recent and remote memory sources of their dreams. The celebrity manipulation did not affect dream content. However, the dataset offers rich descriptive information about how recent and remote memory fragments are incorporated into dreams and how multiple memory sources combine to create bizarre, imaginative scenarios. These observations are discussed in light of the proposed memory updating function of sleep-dependent memory consolidation and the NEXTUP model of dreaming.