Hard hard to live your dreams – especially when you can’t remember them.
Dream Recall is the ability to call at least some significant details from a dream after you wake up. Only 11% of Americans almost always remember their dreams – it’s a mystery why it’s easier for some than others.
Now, researchers in Italy say they have identified individual characteristics and external factors that can affect the chances of waking up in the morning with impression and memories of a dream experience.
“Our findings suggest that Dream Recrice is not only a matter of destiny, but a reflection of how personal attitudes, cognitive features and sleep dynamics interact,” said the author of the main study Giulio Bernardi, a professor in general psychology at IMT school for advanced Lucca studies.
What is a dream?
A dream is a sequence of images, thoughts, emotions and sensations that our mind generates while sleeping. We all dream every night.
Dream is believed to help us process our emotions, preserve memories, strengthen our brain’s nerve connections, reduce stress, solve problems, and think creatively.
Living dreams occur more often during the rapid sleeping phase of eye movement (Rem), when the brain is particularly active.
Some people, especially women, said they were able to remember their dreams most often during the Covid-19 pandemic, which researchers attribute to greater stress, depression and sleep disruptions.
How did the study work?
IMT research was conducted from 2020 to 2024.
Over 200 participants, between 18 and 70, took psychological tests and answered questionnaires before and after trial to determine their anxiety levels, their interest in their dreams and tendency to distract.
They were given a voice recorder to report daily for 15 days whether they dreamed or not to describe the dream whether to do so.
Each participant also worn an actigraph, a device that reveals the duration, quality and disturbances of sleep.
Which factors increase the chances of better dream memory?
The researchers proposed that people most likely remember dreams:
- Have a positive attitude for dreams
- Tend to let their minds wander
- Spend longer periods of time asleep
- Live in warm weather – participants reported lower dreams of dreams during winter
- Are younger – the elderly often have “white dreams”, the unclear feeling of dreaming without concrete evidence
“This knowledge not only deepens our understanding of the mechanisms that stand after the dream, but also have implications to explore the role of dreams in mental health and the study of human consciousness,” Bernard said.
What else is there?
The findings were published Tuesday in the communication magazine Psychology.
Valentina Elce, an IMT researcher and the first author of the study, said the data collected in this project will allow the team to research unusual changes in dream patterns and their possible importance for predicting or identifying conditions medical or psychological.
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