Incorporation of complex narratives into dreaming

Dreams incorporate specific information from waking experiences, and this incorporation may aid memory consolidation. Participants listened to an audiobook while falling asleep and were awakened during the night to report dreams. Blind raters could identify which audiobook a participant had heard based solely on dream reports, for both NREM and REM sleep dreams. Participants whose dreams more strongly incorporated the audiobook content tended to recognize more of that content later. The findings suggest that salient daytime experiences resurface in dreams and that content selected for memory consolidation during sleep is more strongly incorporated into dreams.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Reactivation of waking neuronal activity during sleep holds a functional role in memory consolidation. Reprocessing of daytime memory in dreams might aid later memory performance in a similar way. Numerous findings hint at a link between dreaming and sleep-dependent memory processing; however, studies investigating day-residue incorporation in dreaming led to mixed results so far. In this study, we used a naturalistic learning paradigm aimed at biasing dream content by manipulating presleep experience. Participants listened to one of four different audiobooks while falling asleep and were awoken several times during the night to report their dreams. Afterward, we tested how well they remembered the content of the audiobook. We then asked three blind raters to guess, based solely on anonymized dream reports, which audiobook someone had listened to before experiencing a dream. Our findings show that dreams across the whole night and from both non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep awakenings contain specific information about the content of narratives studied before sleep. Moreover, participants with stronger incorporation of the audiobook in their dreams showed a tendency to recognize more audiobook content across the sleep period. Together, these findings suggest that salient day-time experiences resurface in dreams and that content selected for consolidation during sleep is more strongly incorporated.