Your Dreams Are Far From Random, New Research Suggests

Sleep is hard enough to understand. Scientists still don’t fully know why we spend about a third of our lives in an unconscious state. 

So perhaps it makes sense that we don’t really have a handle on the hallucinations that happen during that period, or dreaming.

Still, new research published in Communications Psychology suggested that there may be method to the chaos. 

They found that “stable individual traits and incidental experiences jointly shape dream semantics” – in other words, life events and personal characteristics might matter more than we realised.

What might dreams say about us?

The researchers looked at over 3,700 dream reports from 287 participants, whose ages ranged from 18-70. 

They also recorded their daytime experiences over two weeks. During the trial period, researchers conducted personality and cognitive tests and made psychological profiles of the participants, too. 

Once the 14-day trial was over, the data was collated using natural language processing tools and compared. The study authors began to notice patterns. 

The authors looked at factors like a person’s interest in dreams, the vividness or fragmentation of their dreams, the external events in their waking lives, and a person’s mind’s tendency to wander. 

They found that it wasn’t as straightforward as participants’ minds simply replaying the events of their day. Though some familiar parts of their lives, like their workplaces and place of study, did appear, they weren’t accurate to real life. Instead, it seemed the mind was kind of “riffing” on reality.

Dreams “tend to integrate waking elements in metaphorical or associative ways that vary with each dreamer’s history, beliefs, and concerns,” the paper reads.

And large events, like Covid, generally made people’s dreams more emotionally intense and filled with themes like capture. That intensity and those themes faded over time, suggesting the major event was behind the change.

What do my dreams mean? 

In general, this research found that fragmented, “bizarre,” and frequently changing dreams were more linked to mind-wandering.

And immersive, emotionally intense dreams were associated with believing dreams are important and meaningful. 

Additionally, the paper reads, “a positive attitude towards dreaming has also been associated with a higher probability of waking up in the morning with at least the perception of having been dreaming just a few seconds before,” though “self-reported sleep quality was related to the bizarreness of dream reports”.

In this research, a person’s sleep pattern had “a relatively weak association with dream content”.

Study author and researcher Valentina Elce said: “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 live through.”