Emotion and cognition: feeling and character identification in dreaming.

Emotions felt during dreams are almost always triggered by the characters that appear, and people frequently use those emotions to identify who the characters are. Affection and joy are commonly linked with known characters, even when those emotional associations contradict how the person feels about the same individual while awake. These patterns align with brain activity differences between dreaming and waking states: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which supports short-term memory, is less active during dreaming, while limbic areas involved in emotion are more active and receive minimal input from the prefrontal cortex.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between dream emotion and dream character identification. Thirty-five subjects provided 320 dream reports and answers to questions on characters that appeared in their dreams. We found that emotions are almost always evoked by our dream characters and that they are often used as a basis for identifying them. We found that affection and joy were commonly associated with known characters and were used to identify them even when these emotional attributes were inconsistent with those of the waking state. These findings are consistent with the finding that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, associated with short-term memory, is less active in the dreaming compared to the wake brain, while the paleocortical and subcortical limbic areas are more active. The findings are also consistent with the suggestion that these limbic areas have minimal input from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the dreaming brain.