The influence of intentions on dream content
SLEEP Advances January 1, 2024 Julia Fechner, Maren Born, Massimiliano Mancini et al. 1 citation
Unfinished intentions are more likely to appear in dreams than completed ones. In a sleep laboratory study, 19 participants received three tasks before sleep: one they completed, one they planned to do the next morning, and one they were interrupted from and told to resume later. Dream reports collected after awakenings were analyzed using a transformer-based method that measured semantic similarity between dream content and the tasks. Dreams showed significantly greater similarity to uncompleted and interrupted tasks than to the completed task. Active intentions, whether unfulfilled or interrupted, increase the likelihood that dream content will be semantically related to those intentions.