Communications Psychology
April 28, 2026
Valentina Elce, Giorgia Bontempi, Serena Scarpelli et al.
Dreams are universal yet highly idiosyncratic experiences. While memories and personal concerns are known to influence dream content, how such influences evolve over time and how stable individual traits shape dreaming remain unclear. Here, we systematically quantified the semantic structure of dreams in a large, multimodal dataset comprising 3366 reports of dreams and waking experiences...
PLoS Biology
March 1, 2026
Adriana Michalak, Davide Marzoli, Francesco Pietrogiacomi et al.
Perceived sleep depth is a key determinant of subjective sleep quality, traditionally thought to reflect unconsciousness and reduced cortical activation. Here, we combined high-density EEG with a serial awakening paradigm during NREM2 (N2) sleep in healthy human participants to examine its neural and experiential correlates. As expected, deeper sleep was associated with reduced cortical...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
September 8, 2025
Adriana Michalak, Davide Marzoli, Francesco Pietrogiacomi et al.
preprint
Perceived sleep depth is a key determinant of subjective sleep quality, traditionally thought to reflect unconsciousness and reduced cortical activation. Here, we combined high-density EEG with a serial awakening paradigm during NREM sleep to examine its neural and experiential correlates. As expected, deeper sleep was associated with reduced cortical activation, reflected in a lower...
Nature Communications
August 13, 2025
William Wong, Rubén Herzog, Kátia Cristine Andrade et al.
10 citations
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
June 28, 2025
Jessica Palmieri, Valentina Elce, Monika Schönauer
1 citation
preprint
Abstract Emotional processing is a crucial adaptive function. Research suggests that sleep, particularly rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, may have a role in processing the emotional load of past events. Notably, dream experiences may offer insight into this nighttime process. Some studies have reported increased emotionality in dreams as the night progresses, possibly reflecting ongoing...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
May 21, 2025
Valentina Elce, Giorgia Bontempi, Serena Scarpelli et al.
1 citation
preprint
Dreams are universal yet deeply personal experiences. While memory and personal concerns influence dream content, the impact of other individual, generalizable traits remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we built a multimodal dataset including dream and wakefulness reports, alongside demographic, psychometric, cognitive, and sleep-related measures in a large adult cohort. Natural...
Communications Psychology
February 18, 2025
Valentina Elce, Damiana Bergamo, Giorgia Bontempi et al.
Evidence suggests that (almost) everyone dreams during their sleep and may actually do so for a large part of the night. Yet, dream recall shows large interindividual variability. Understanding the factors that influence dream recall is crucial for advancing our knowledge regarding dreams' origin, significance, and functions. Here, we tackled this issue by prospectively collecting dream reports...
Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology
2024
Lorenzo Bertolini, Valentina Elce, Adriana Michalak et al.
In the field of dream research, the study of dream content typically relies on the analysis of verbal reports provided by dreamers upon awakening from their sleep. This task is classically performed through manual scoring provided by trained annotators, at a great time expense. While a consistent body of work suggests that natural language processing (NLP) tools can support the automatic...
May 16, 2023
William Wong, Kátia C. Andrade, Thomas Andrillon et al.
21 citations
preprint
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
arXiv (Cornell University)
February 28, 2023
Lorenzo Bertolini, Valentina Elce, Adriana Michalak et al.
1 citation
In the field of dream research, the study of dream content typically relies on the analysis of verbal reports provided by dreamers upon awakening from their sleep. This task is classically performed through manual scoring provided by trained annotators, at a great time expense. While a consistent body of work suggests that natural language processing (NLP) tools can support the automatic...
Clocks & Sleep
September 19, 2021
Valentina Elce, Giacomo Handjaras, Giulio Bernardi
29 citations
The study of dreams represents a crucial intersection between philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, and clinical interests. Importantly, one of the main sources of insight into dreaming activity are the (oral or written) reports provided by dreamers upon awakening from their sleep. Classically, two main types of information are commonly extracted from dream reports: structural and...