SLEEP Advances
January 1, 2025
Anne Richards, Anthony Santistevan, Miles Kovnick et al.
8 citations
Trauma nightmares that closely replicate a real traumatic event are especially linked to next-day distress and suicidal thoughts, more so than other dream features. Subjective dream length, post-dream arousal, and distress severity also independently predict daytime symptoms. The findings highlight the value of measuring specific dream characteristics to understand nightmare effects and their connection to suicidal ideation, and support the use of mobile app sleep diaries for collecting detailed, real-time data.
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 Advances
January 1, 2024
Christopher M. McGrory, Augustus Kram Mendelsohn, Suzanne L. Pineles et al.
2 citations
Trauma-related nightmares (TRNs) elicit psychophysiological responses similar to those triggered by recalling the original traumatic event. In a pilot study of 17 trauma-exposed participants with clinical or sub-clinical PTSD who reported frequent TRNs, heart rate, skin conductance, and facial muscle activity did not differ significantly between recollections of the index trauma and the most trauma-like nightmare. Bayesian analyses supported the null hypothesis of no difference. Emotional ratings were also largely equivalent, except that sadness was lower for nightmare recollections. These findings suggest TRNs might be as effective a target as the trauma memory itself for imaginal exposure therapy, pending replication.
SLEEP Advances
January 1, 2024
Erin J. Wamsley, Tempest Trost, Matthew A. Tucker
2 citations
Dreaming is influenced by the activation of newly formed memory traces in the sleeping brain, but how this happens is still being investigated. In a study testing whether people dream of recent experiences that overlap with well-established semantic networks, participants received new information about a favorite celebrity. Their dream content was tracked across three consecutive nights, and they were asked about recent and remote memory sources of their dreams. The celebrity manipulation did not affect dream content. However, the dataset offers rich descriptive information about how recent and remote memory fragments are incorporated into dreams and how multiple memory sources combine to create bizarre, imaginative scenarios. These observations are discussed in light of the proposed memory updating function of sleep-dependent memory consolidation and the NEXTUP model of dreaming.
SLEEP Advances
January 1, 2025
Luis Alfredo Moctezuma, Marta Molinas, Takashi Abe
1 citation
Machine learning models trained on high-density electroencephalography (EEG) signals can automatically detect whether a person is dreaming during the N2 stage of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep with high accuracy. Using permutation-based channel selection, the models achieved up to 0.94 accuracy, F1 score, precision, and recall, an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.97, and a kappa of 0.88 on a balanced dataset of dream experience and no experience reports. Performance remained similar when using 30–40 EEG channels, and removing occipital channels slightly improved accuracy by 0.02. On a separate set of dream reports without recall, accuracy was 0.7. Reducing the number of channels makes portable, low-cost devices for real-time dream detection feasible.
SLEEP Advances
January 1, 2025
Chadwick C Frost, Erin J. Wamsley
1 citation
Activating a remote emotional memory just before sleep can induce dreams about that memory. In a study with 34 participants, those who recalled and wrote about an emotionally negative remote memory before a daytime nap later had dreams judged to contain content from that memory more than from a control task. Participants also rated their dreams as more emotionally negative after the memory task. The findings suggest that dream content can be experimentally influenced by reactivating older memories, possibly reflecting memory reconsolidation during sleep.
SLEEP Advances
January 1, 2024
Julia Fechner, Maren Born, Massimiliano Mancini et al.
1 citation
Unfinished intentions are more likely to appear in dreams than completed ones. In a sleep laboratory study, 19 participants received three tasks before sleep: one they completed, one they planned to do the next morning, and one they were interrupted from and told to resume later. Dream reports collected after awakenings were analyzed using a transformer-based method that measured semantic similarity between dream content and the tasks. Dreams showed significantly greater similarity to uncompleted and interrupted tasks than to the completed task. Active intentions, whether unfulfilled or interrupted, increase the likelihood that dream content will be semantically related to those intentions.
SLEEP Advances
July 8, 2026
Emma Peters, Xinlin Wang, Johanna Heitmann et al.
Targeted bodily stimulation during REM sleep can affect dream lucidity, but the effects depend on the type of stimulation. Electrical muscle stimulation did not increase lucid awareness, whereas galvanic vestibular stimulation was associated with higher lucidity ratings and questionnaire scores, even though the stimulation was rarely incorporated into dream content directly. The findings suggest that modulating the sense of bodily self during REM sleep may enhance reflective awareness without requiring sensory incorporation into dreams. Non-invasive vestibular stimulation may offer a new way to study lucid dreaming mechanisms.
SLEEP Advances
January 1, 2026
Tony J. Cunningham, Erin J. Wamsley, JD Payne
A Festschrift honors Dr. Robert Stickgold's career, which transformed sleep from a passive state into an active component of memory consolidation, where reactivation and dreaming stabilize, abstract, and integrate waking experiences. His work established that sleep improves performance on visual discrimination and procedural memory, linked gains to Stage 2 sleep and spindles, and showed sleep extracts gist and transforms memories for future use. He developed the Nightcap device for at-home dream collection and the NEXTUP model of dreaming as creating novel meaning. Contributions from colleagues report that reactivation during wake fails to improve performance like sleep does, sleep restriction impairs memory discrimination in adolescents, total sleep deprivation impairs memory but recovery sleep enhances emotional content, and closed-loop auditory stimulation targets spindles without disrupting sleep.
SLEEP Advances
October 1, 2024
M. Burge, H. Meaklim, M. Turner et al.
Specific words used to describe dream content are associated with higher levels of anxiety and stress. In a cohort of 217 participants who completed the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale 21 and described their last remembered dream, no significant predictors were found for depression. However, a principal component high in frequencies of visual and auditory perception, motion, and space language significantly increased the odds of severe and higher anxiety (Tjur R² = 0.04). A component high in frequencies of substances, sexual, food, and motion language significantly increased the odds of moderate and higher stress (Tjur R² = 0.09). Reviewing dream content may provide additional insights for clinicians.