Dreams are intensely social, populated by both strangers and known individuals. Over two weeks, most participant dreams included strangers alongside familiar people, and personality traits influenced the types of characters appearing. Comparing dream reports to participants' core support networks and daily diaries showed that relationship-specific factors and daily interaction predicted whether known individuals appeared in dreams. While daily contact generally increased the likelihood of dreaming about someone, the opposite held for close family members like parents or siblings, suggesting dreams may compensate for their absence by maintaining those relationships.
People who have more dissociative experiences during the day also tend to have more nightmares, lucid dreams, and beliefs in paranormal phenomena, and they take longer to fall asleep. The coherence and perspective of dreams—specifically how stable and first-person the dreamed self feels—predicts about 26% of the variation in dissociative symptoms. These findings suggest that REM sleep intruding into waking consciousness may contribute to some dissociative experiences. The results come from 219 volunteers who completed surveys including the Dissociative Experiences Scale, plus dream reports and sleep measures from a subgroup. The authors propose that dream content stability could be a useful indicator of dissociative tendencies and that treating nightmare distress might help reduce dissociation.