Central OC Times

A groundbreaking study led by the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) has shed light on the role of dreams in processing extreme experiences. The research indicates that a night spent dreaming can help individuals better process emotionally charged events while reducing their severity.

The novel study was conducted by researchers at the UC Irvine Sleep and Cognition Lab. They examined how dream recall and mood influenced memory consolidation and emotion regulation the following day. The findings were recently published in Scientific Reports.

“We discovered that people who report dreaming show greater emotional memory processing, suggesting that dreams help us work through our emotional experiences,” said corresponding author Sara Mednick, UC Irvine professor of cognitive sciences and lab director. “This is significant because we know that dreams can reflect our waking experiences, but this is the first evidence that they play an active role in transforming our responses to our waking experiences by prioritizing negative memories over neutral memories and reducing our next-day emotional response to them.”

Jing Zhang, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School, added: “Our work provides the first empirical support for dreaming’s active involvement in sleep-dependent emotional memory processing, suggesting that dreaming after an emotional experience might help us feel better in the morning.”

The study involved 125 women who were part of a larger research project examining the effects of menstrual cycles on sleep. The participants underwent an emotional picture task before sleeping either at home or in one of the sleep lab's private bedrooms. Upon waking up, they recorded whether they had dreamed and detailed their overall mood. Two hours later, they completed a second round of the emotional picture task to measure image recall and reaction.

Zhang explained: “Different than typical sleep diary studies that collect data over weeks to see if daytime experiences appear in dreams, we used a single-night study focused on emotionally charged material and asked if the subject’s ability to recall their dream was associated with a change in memory and emotional response.”

The results revealed that participants who reported dreaming had better recall and were less reactive to negative images. Furthermore, the more positive the dream, the more positively that individual rated negative images the next day.

“This research gives us new insight into the active role dreams play in how we naturally process our day-to-day experiences and might lead to interventions that increase dreaming in order to help people work through hard life experiences,” Mednick concluded.

The study was funded by the National Institute on Aging under award number RF1AG061355.