Why do some dreams seem so vivid that they seem almost real, while others unfold as confusing fragments that are difficult to remember or understand? New research suggests that the answer may depend on a combination of personality, sleep quality, mental habits, and important events unfolding in the outside world.
A study led by researchers at the IMT School of Advanced Studies in Lucca found that dreams are not simply random collections of images and thoughts. Rather, they appear to be shaped by both individual differences and shared experiences, including major social disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thousands of dream reports reveal hidden patterns
The research, published in Communications Psychologyexamined more than 3,700 descriptions of dreams and waking experiences from 287 people between the ages of 18 and 70.
For two weeks, participants recorded their dreams and daily experiences. The researchers also collected information about each person’s sleeping habits, personality, cognitive abilities, and psychological characteristics.
This broad set of information allowed the team to compare what people experienced while awake with the stories, scenarios and emotions that appeared in their dreams.
How AI helped scientists study dreams
To analyze such a large number of written reports, the researchers used natural language processing (NLP), a form of artificial intelligence that examines patterns, relationships and meanings in language.
Instead of relying solely on the researchers to read and interpret each dream individually, the technology allowed the team to measure the semantic structure of the reports. Semantic structure refers to how ideas, words and concepts are connected within a language.
The results showed that dream content was neither completely random nor inherently chaotic. Instead, dreams reflected a complex mix of personal characteristics, including a tendency to wander, interest in dreams, and the quality of a person’s sleep. Events occurring in the world at large also influenced what people dreamed about.
Dreams are not limited to repeating the day
When the researchers compared participants’ descriptions of their waking lives with reports of their dreams, they found that the brain did not appear to reproduce daily experiences exactly as they happened.
Instead, family details were transformed.
A workplace, hospital, classroom, or other everyday environment may appear in a dream, but is often combined with unrelated places, changing points of view, or unfamiliar surroundings. Different parts of a person’s life could merge into a single vivid scene.
These findings suggest that dreaming is not a simple repetition system. The sleeping mind appears to reorganize fragments of reality, combining memories with imagination, expectations, and possible future experiences.
The result can be a completely new setting that seems immersive, emotionally intense, or surreal.
Personality can influence the intensity of dreams
The way dreams were transformed also differed from person to person.
People who were more likely to experience mind wandering while awake tended to report dreams that changed rapidly and felt more fragmented. His dreams often flashed between scenes, ideas, or perspectives.
In contrast, participants who valued dreams more and believed that dreaming had personal meaning tended to describe richer, more immersive experiences. Their dream reports contained stronger perceptual details, making the scenes appear more vivid and realistic.
The findings do not necessarily show that believing in dreams directly causes more vivid dreams. However, they reveal a strong relationship between how people think about dreams and how they experience or remember them.
The pandemic left its mark on dreams
The researchers also examined dream reports collected during the COVID-19 lockdown by scientists at the Sapienza University of Rome. They compared those reports to data collected in subsequent months and years by the IMT School team.
During lockdown, dreams contained stronger emotions and more references to restrictions, barriers, confinements and other limitations. These themes reflected the conditions that people experienced in daily life.
As the months passed, those patterns became less pronounced. This gradual change suggests that dreams may evolve along with psychological adjustment, particularly as people adapt to stressful or disturbing events.
In other words, dreams can provide clues about how the mind responds to important changes over time.
“Our findings show that dreams are not just a reflection of past experiences, but a dynamic process shaped by who we are and what we experience,” explains Valentina Elce, researcher at the IMT School and lead author of the article. “By combining large-scale data with computational methods, we were able to discover patterns in dream content that were previously difficult to detect.”
A new tool to study the sleeping mind
The study also demonstrates how artificial intelligence could change dream research.
The NLP models were able to identify the meaning and structure of dream reports with similar accuracy to independent human raters. This suggests that computational tools may allow scientists to analyze much larger collections of dreams in a consistent and repeatable way.
That could create new opportunities to study consciousness, memory, emotional processing and mental health.
Because dreams are very personal and often difficult to describe, it has traditionally been challenging to investigate them on a large scale. AI-based language analysis can help researchers uncover patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.
This work was supported by a grant from the BIAL Foundation (#091/2020) and by the TweakDreams ERC seed grant (#948891). The research was carried out at the IMT School of Advanced Studies in Lucca, in collaboration with researchers from the Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Camerino.