Scientific Reports
May 15, 2023
Adam Haar Horowitz, Kathleen Esfahany, Tomás Vega Galvez et al.
31 citations
Sleep onset (N1 sleep) enhances creative performance more than wakefulness, and successfully incubating a specific theme into N1 dreams further boosts creativity. Participants who received auditory cues during sleep onset to introduce a theme showed greater semantic distance and better performance on theme-related creativity tasks compared to those who remained awake. This provides the first controlled evidence that dream content itself, not just N1 sleep, contributes to creative enhancement, supporting N1 as a cognitive state with heightened associative divergence.
SLEEP Advances
March 8, 2025
Westley Youngren, Adam Haar Horowitz, Victoria West Staples et al.
4 citations
A technique called Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI), which guides dream content during a nap, may increase how much control people feel over their dreams (Dream Self-Efficacy; DSE). In 25 participants who completed surveys before and after a TDI protocol during N1 sleep, DSE levels were significantly higher afterward. DSE relates to broader self-efficacy and has been linked to better outcomes in therapies for trauma-related nightmares. The findings suggest TDI could improve sleep-related interventions, though further research with control conditions is needed.
Sleep
May 1, 2025
Robert Stickgold, Alon Shamir, Noa Brande-Eilat et al.
1 citation
A new software platform called Arctop Sleep, which uses a mobile app and an EEG headband to detect sleep onset in real time, can induce dreams on pre-selected topics and increase creativity around those topics. In pilot studies with participants experiencing PTSD, serial awakenings and dream reports were successfully recorded, with reports containing direct and metaphorical references to the chosen topic. Participants showed improvement in creativity and resilience related to the topic on post-sleep tasks compared to baseline. The platform is described as comfortable and promising for leveraging targeted dream incubation to enhance cognitive and emotional processing of trauma memories.
Frontiers in Sleep
June 24, 2026
Adam Haar Horowitz, Karen R Konkoly, Michelle Carr et al.
A pilot study tested whether targeted dream incubation (TDI) at sleep onset can direct dream content into subsequent REM sleep. Eleven participants received verbal prompts about a tree and were awakened serially at sleep onset, then during a daytime nap. All 11 successfully incubated the target theme at sleep onset. Of the eight who entered REM sleep, four (50%) incorporated the tree into their first REM dream, and five (63%) did so in later REM dreams. Results suggest TDI may influence REM dream content, offering a method to explore how dream generation and function may be continuous or differ across sleep stages.
Sleep
May 1, 2026
Westley Youngren, Victoria West Staples, Emma Angle et al.
A single 90-minute session of Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI), which involves giving auditory cues to shape dream content, increased dream self-efficacy (DSE) immediately after and one week later in both a non-clinical group and a group with frequent trauma-related nightmares (TRNs). A control nap group showed no change in DSE. Only the non-nightmare TDI group showed significant reductions at one-week follow-up in thoughts of suicide, insomnia, PTSD, and nightmare distress. The results suggest TDI may reduce negative outcomes in people with TRNs, potentially through increased DSE, and justify larger-scale investigation.
Sleep
May 1, 2025
Westley Youngren, Emma Angle, Victoria West Staples et al.
A brief nap-based intervention using verbal cues before sleep, called Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI), can increase people's confidence in their ability to dream (dreaming self-efficacy) and enhance the joy they feel about their dreams. In a study of 15 participants, 80% reported dreams that included the cued subject (a tree). Dreaming self-efficacy scores rose significantly from before the nap to immediately after and remained higher at a one-week follow-up. Joy related to dreams also increased significantly from baseline to the one-week follow-up. These results suggest TDI is a reliable method for boosting dreaming self-efficacy and may also positively affect emotional responses to dreaming.
Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society
January 1, 2025
Robert Stickgold, Funke Sangodeyi
A central claim of Freudian dream theory—that dreams have thematic coherence even when scenes or plots shift abruptly—was tested by asking judges to distinguish intact dream reports from ones that had been cut at their discontinuities and spliced with segments from other people's dreams. Judges correctly identified which reports were intact only 57% of the time, barely above chance. Only 3 of 20 reports were reliably scored correctly, and one intact report was mis-scored by 80% of judges. Characters, locations, and objects helped judges, while psychoanalytic content and writing style did not. The authors conclude that apparent coherence in dreams likely arises from the interpreter's mind, not the dreamer's.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Adam Haar Horowitz, Tony J. Cunningham, Pattie Maes et al.
A new wearable device called Dormio automatically delivers auditory dream incubations during the hypnagogic period at sleep onset, enabling targeted information to be incorporated directly into dream content through a process termed targeted dream incubation (TDI). The protocol demonstrates that dream content can be experimentally manipulated, and the authors discuss how TDI can serve as a tool for controlled research on the role of dreams in memory consolidation. The work opens the black box of dreaming by providing a method to engineer dream content and study its relationship to overnight memory transformation.
Journal of Sleep Research
February 1, 2019
Erin J. Wamsley, Robert Stickgold
Dreaming about a spatial learning task during sleep predicts improved performance the next morning. In an overnight study, people trained on a virtual maze navigation task reported dreams from all sleep phases that reflected the task. Unambiguous representation of the task in dream content was associated with better next-morning performance. These findings align with models of memory consolidation that propose memory traces are reactivated during sleep, and replicate earlier work showing that dreaming about a learning task during a nap predicted performance gains.
Sleep
February 1, 2014
Erin J. Wamsley, Claire E H M Donjacour, Thomas E Scammell et al.
A distinctive feature of narcolepsy, termed 'dream delusions,' occurs when patients mistake the memory of a vivid dream for a real experience and form sustained false beliefs that can persist for days or weeks. In interviews with 46 narcolepsy patients with cataplexy and 41 healthy controls at academic medical centers in Boston and Leiden, dream delusions were surprisingly common and often severe, differing from fleeting hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations. These false memories suggest source memory deficits in narcolepsy that have not yet been fully characterized.
Sleep
January 1, 2010
Erin J. Wamsley, Karen Perry, Ina Djonlagic et al.
During light NREM sleep, people's dream reports often replay recent waking experiences. In a visuomotor learning task, 30% of verbal reports collected from sleeping participants related to the task. The replay became more abstracted from the original experience as sleep progressed. These findings suggest that memory reactivation during sleep is reflected in subjective dream content, offering a window into cognitive processing in the sleeping brain.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
January 1, 2003
Magdalena J Fosse, Roar Fosse, J Allan Hobson et al.
Sleep mentation often reflects waking life, but not through exact replay of episodic memories. Over 14 days, 29 subjects logged daytime activities and dreams, scoring dream incorporation of waking experiences. Although 65% of 299 sleep mentation reports reflected aspects of recent waking life, episodic replay of waking events occurred in only 1-2% of dream reports. This suggests that sleep's role in memory processing is not primarily about replaying specific episodes, consistent with evidence that sleep does not consolidate episodic memories.
Science
October 13, 2000
Robert Stickgold, April Malia, Denise Maguire et al.
People who played Tetris reported seeing involuntary, game-like images as they fell asleep. Three amnesic patients with damage to the medial temporal lobes also reported these hypnagogic images, even though they could not remember playing the game, indicating that such imagery does not require the declarative memory system. Control participants reported images from older versions of Tetris they had played before, showing that remote memories can shape the images that arise from recent experience.