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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 09 2021, @08:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the perchance-to-dream dept.

Study finds novel evidence that dreams reflect multiple memories, anticipate future events:

Dreams result from a process that often combines fragments of multiple life experiences and anticipates future events, according to novel evidence from a new study.

Results show that 53.5% of dreams were traced to a memory, and nearly 50% of reports with a memory source were connected to multiple past experiences. The study also found that 25.7% of dreams were related to specific impending events, and 37.4% of dreams with a future event source were additionally related to one or more specific memories of past experiences. Future-oriented dreams became proportionally more common later in the night.

"Humans have struggled to understand the meaning of dreams for millennia," said principal investigator Erin Wamsley, who has a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience and is an associate professor in the department of psychology and program in neuroscience at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. "We present new evidence that dreams reflect a memory-processing function. Although it has long been known that dreams incorporate fragments of past experience, our data suggest that dreams also anticipate probable future events."

According to Wamsley, the proportional increase of future-oriented dreams later in the night may be driven by temporal proximity to the upcoming events. While these dreams rarely depict future events realistically, the activation and recombination of future-relevant memory fragments may nonetheless serve an adaptive function.

Journal Reference:
Wamsley, Erin. 034 Dreaming as Constructive Episodic Future Simulation, Sleep (DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsab072.033)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday June 09 2021, @07:39PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 09 2021, @07:39PM (#1143662) Journal

    I still have dreams about college though, being late for a class, unprepared for an exam, etc. which seems strange b/c I graduated 25 years ago.

    I had those dreams for about 20 years after college, but they eventually went away.

    Let's not forget the common "showing up to class then discovering you are naked, or somehow very improperly dressed". That probably falls under the anxiety, and 'how would you solve this problem?' type dream.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10 2021, @03:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10 2021, @03:17AM (#1143788)

    The funny thing about those kind of dreams for me is that I seem to be the only one in my dream that notices or cares that I am naked or improperly dressed, so it isn't really an anxiety dream for me. My dreams are really odd, odd things happen, odd situations happen, but it all seems somehow not odd. And the "scene" changes unnoticeably, where I'm in one place, then I'm in a new situation and I never noticed the transition.

    Now: sex dreams. Why can't I have those?