Dreams can feel like a mess, but new research says they follow a pattern.
A study from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca found that dreams are shaped by a mix of personal traits and real-life experiences, rather than acting as a simple replay of the day. The research was published in Communications Psychology.
Researchers examined more than 3,700 reports describing dreams and waking experiences from 287 participants aged 18 to 70. Over two weeks, participants kept daily records while researchers also gathered data on sleep habits, cognitive skills, personality traits and psychological profiles.
To study the reports, the team used natural language processing tools to analyse the meaning and structure of dream descriptions.
The results showed dreams were not random or chaotic. Instead, they reflected an interaction between individual characteristics, including a tendency to mind-wander, interest in dreams and sleep quality, and outside influences such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
By comparing descriptions of daily experiences with dream reports, researchers found the brain did not simply replay waking life during sleep. Instead, it reshaped those experiences.
Settings such as workplaces, hospitals or schools were not reproduced exactly. The study found they were reimagined into vivid scenes that combined different elements and shifted perspectives in unexpected ways.
The researchers said this suggests dreams actively reconstruct reality rather than passively reflecting it, blending memories with imagined or anticipated events to create new, sometimes surreal scenarios.
The study also found differences in dream style from person to person. People who tended to mind-wander more often reported fragmented dreams that changed constantly. People who placed greater importance on dreams and believed they had meaning tended to report richer and more immersive dream environments.
The research also looked at the effect of large-scale events on dreaming. Data collected during the COVID-19 lockdown by researchers at Sapienza University of Rome, then compared with the IMT team’s findings, showed dreams during lockdown were more emotionally intense and often included themes of restriction and limitation.
Those patterns gradually faded over time as people adapted, suggesting dream content changed alongside psychological adjustment to major life events.
“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, researcher at the IMT School and lead author of the paper.
“By combining large-scale data with computational methods, we were able to uncover patterns in dream content that were previously difficult to detect.”
The study also found NLP models captured the meaning and structure of dream reports with a level of accuracy similar to human evaluators.
The research was supported by a grant from the BIAL Foundation, number 091/2020, and by the TweakDreams ERC Starting Grant, number 948891. It was carried out at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca with researchers from Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Camerino.
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