BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
There is something that happens in a dream that never happens anywhere else. A familiar place, a workplace or a school corridor, becomes somehow wrong, layered with elements that don’t belong, approached from a direction that doesn’t exist. That sense of wrongness is, it turns out, the point.
New findings from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca show that the sleeping brain doesn’t simply replay the day. It actively reshapes it. Familiar settings aren’t reproduced during sleep; they’re reimagined into vivid, often immersive scenes that combine different elements and shift perspective in unexpected ways. The brain, in other words, is not a recorder. It’s an editor.
How scientists studied what happens while we sleep
The study, published in Communications Psychology, analyzed more than 3,700 reports drawn from both dreams and waking experiences, collected from 287 participants between the ages of 18 and 70. Over two weeks, participants kept daily logs of their experiences, while scientists gathered data on sleep habits, personality traits, and psychological profiles.
To make sense of that volume of material, the team used natural language processing tools, a form of AI capable of reading the meaning and structure of language at scale. This allowed them to detect patterns in dream content that would have been impossible to identify by hand.
“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,” said Valentina Elce, a researcher at IMT and lead author of the study. “By combining large-scale data with computational methods, we were able to uncover patterns in dream content that were previously difficult to detect.”
Personality shapes what happens in sleep
Not everyone dreams in the same way, and the study found that individual traits predict a lot about dream style.
People who tend to mind-wander more often reported dreams that were fragmented and shifting, with no stable through-line. Those who place greater importance on dreams and believe they carry meaning tended to report richer, more immersive experiences, vivid environments, rather than scattered impressions.
The study also revealed how large-scale events leave their mark. Data collected during the COVID-19 lockdown, gathered by researchers at Sapienza University of Rome and later compared with the IMT team’s findings, showed that dreams during that period were more emotionally intense and frequently included themes of restriction and confinement. As time passed and people adjusted, those patterns gradually faded, suggesting that dream content tracks psychological adaptation to major disruptions, not just the disruptions themselves.
What this means for understanding the mind
The practical implications reach beyond sleep science. Natural language processing models were able to analyze the meaning and structure of dream reports with accuracy comparable to human evaluators, suggesting that these tools could make it significantly easier to study consciousness, memory, and mental health at scale and with greater consistency.
Dreams, the study suggests, offer a window into something that isn’t immediately visible in waking life: the way personality and lived experience get folded together into the sleeping mind’s nightly reconstruction of reality. What’s being built in that process isn’t a copy. It’s something shaped by who you are, what you’ve lived through, and where your attention tends to wander. That complexity, once too unwieldy to examine at any meaningful scale, is now something scientists are beginning to map.
Source study: Communications Psychology— Individual traits and experiences predict the content of dreams
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