Incorporation of complex narratives into dreaming
Sleep September 18, 2025 Jessica Palmieri, Deniz Kumral, Sammy-Jo Wymer et al.
Dreams incorporate specific information from waking experiences, and this incorporation may aid memory consolidation. Participants listened to an audiobook while falling asleep and were awakened during the night to report dreams. Blind raters could identify which audiobook a participant had heard based solely on dream reports, for both NREM and REM sleep dreams. Participants whose dreams more strongly incorporated the audiobook content tended to recognize more of that content later. The findings suggest that salient daytime experiences resurface in dreams and that content selected for memory consolidation during sleep is more strongly incorporated into dreams.