The influence of intentions on dream content

Abstract Study Objectives The “Zeigarnik effect” refers to the phenomenon where future intentions are remembered effectively only as long as they are not executed. This study investigates whether these intentions, which remain active during sleep, influence dream content.

Methods: After an adaptation night, each of the 19 participants (10 women and 9 men) received three different task plans in the evening before the experimental night, each describing how to perform specific tasks. One of the task plans (completed) was then to be executed before the sleep period, another task (uncompleted) was told to be executed in the next morning, and on the third task (interrupted) participants were interrupted during the enactment before sleep and told to resume it the next morning. Polysomnography and multiple awakenings were conducted, resulting in 86 dream reports, 36 in NREM stage 2, and 50 in rapid eye movement sleep. After a traditional rating-based analysis of dream reports yielded inconsistent results, we analyzed the reports using a transformer-based assessment of dream incorporation, which quantified the semantic similarity between the dreams and pre-sleep tasks.

Results: The number of dreams showing above-criterion similarity to the respective task was significantly lower for the completed than the uncompleted or interrupted tasks (p < .05, χ2 test). This pattern was confirmed through a forced choice approach, where—based on the similarity of single sentences of the dream reports—each dream report was allocated to one of the three task plans (p < 0.01, one-tailed χ2 test).

Conclusions: Active intentions increase the likelihood of dream content being semantically similar to these intentions.