Trying to fully describe a dream to another person is often an exercise in futility. Dreams, by their very nature, are intensely personal experiences. While common themes crop up, like showing up to an exam unprepared, falling, or losing teeth, the idiosyncratic textures of your dreams are yours and yours alone (which may be one reason other people typically aren’t interested in hearing the details). But what influences our dreams? New research published in Communications Psychology has some answers.
Psychologists from IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Italy collected more than 3,300 reports of both dreams and everyday experiences from 207 adults between 2020 and 2024, along with measures of other cognitive traits. To help parse this enormous trove of data, they enlisted an AI natural language processing program to break the reports down into their components and categorize them.
Digging into the data, they found that dreams reinterpret elements from everyday life, transforming commonplace scenes and experiences into vivid, immersive tableaus. These transformations varied from person to person, but the researchers were able to find patterns. “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,” study author Valentina Elce explained in a statement.
Read more: “The Dreams of the Man Who Discovered Neurons”
People with a tendency to let their minds wander were more likely to experience dreams as rapidly changing, disjointed vignettes. Those who said dreams held greater value, meaning, and significance were more likely to report a richer and more immersive dream experience.
Analyzing an independent dataset collected during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown revealed how external events can shape our dreams. The researchers found that dreams during this period were more emotionally intense, and thematically different. Lockdown dreams tended to include more motifs centered around constraints and limitations that reflected the social context of the period, although these subsided over time.
Together, researchers say, these findings suggest that dreams are woven out of the separate threads of our personal traits, everyday routines, and the large social context we exist in. In other words, we can’t escape real life—even in our dreams. 
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