The effect of dream report collection and dream incorporation on memory consolidation during sleep
Sarah F. Schoch, Maren J. Cordi, Michael Schredl et al. preprint
Waking participants up to collect dream reports is a common method in dream research, but its effect on memory consolidation was unclear. In 22 healthy young adults, a night with up to six awakenings impaired both subjective and objective sleep quality compared to a night without awakenings, yet did not impair ongoing memory consolidation of a word-picture association task. The learning task was successfully incorporated into dreams collected via awakenings during the night, but not into dreams collected only in the morning. Task incorporation into NREM sleep dreams, but not REM sleep dreams, was related to better task performance the next morning, suggesting NREM dreams may be linked to memory consolidation processes.