The individual determinants of morning dream recall.

Communications Psychology Pub Date : 2025-02-18 DOI:10.1038/s44271-025-00191-z

Valentina Elce, Damiana Bergamo, Giorgia Bontempi, Bianca Pedreschi, Michele Bellesi, Giacomo Handjaras, Giulio Bernardi

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Abstract

Evidence suggests that (almost) everyone dreams during their sleep and may actually do so for a large part of the night. Yet, dream recall shows large interindividual variability. Understanding the factors that influence dream recall is crucial for advancing our knowledge regarding dreams' origin, significance, and functions. Here, we tackled this issue by prospectively collecting dream reports along with demographic information and psychometric, cognitive, actigraphic, and electroencephalographic measures in 217 healthy adults (18-70 y, 116 female participants, 101 male participants). We found that attitude towards dreaming, proneness to mind wandering, and sleep patterns are associated with the probability of reporting a dream upon morning awakening. The likelihood of recalling dream content was predicted by age and vulnerability to interference. Moreover, dream recall appeared to be influenced by night-by-night changes in sleep patterns and showed seasonal fluctuations. Our results provide an account for previous observations regarding inter- and intra-individual variability in morning dream recall.

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