Our dreams are they random and confusing projections or do they have profoundly to do with who we are? A recent Italian scientific study appeared on Communication Psychologyportfolio magazine Naturehas analyzed thousands of stories about dreams and found interesting reports on how ours personality and our experiences shape our nightly adventures. The researchers used theartificial intelligence and advanced natural language processing techniques as the primary driver for be able to quantify and examine dream stories on a large scale. It turns out that elements are deeply anchored in ours personalitysuch as the propensity to stay “with one’s head in the clouds”, but also the curiosity that we have towards the dreams themselves, strongly influence their form and dynamics, as well as the events we experience, especially if they have the dark tones of trauma and of stress.
Personality determines whether we have common or more bizarre dreams
Some people have dreams full of twists and turns, while others only remember banal scenarios. How come? The Italian study recently published on Nature explains to us that, although i dreams are a universal experience, theirs content it is unique to each of us and it comes intimately shaped by the stable traits of our personality. For example, someone who has a strong tendency to get lost in their daydreams, a phenomenon known as “mind wandering” (or mind-wandering), has much more bizarre dreams characterized by continuous changes in setting. From a scientific point of view, this is because daytime mind wandering and nighttime dreaming share a common neural and cognitive architecture: those who have a brain used to disengaging from reality external during the day, activating what is called “default neural network“, will produce internal simulations again more intense and disconnected by normal logical rules during the night.
Other personal characteristics also specifically impact our nights. If you own one good visuospatial memoryyour dreams will tend to be very richer in physical objects and architectural descriptions. And if you simply consider dreams important and have a positive and curious attitude towards them, your mind will reward you with much more emotionally intense and visually richer dream experiences.
The stress of everyday life enters our dream world
In addition to our character, even stressful situations that we live they creep in forcefully in dreams. The most evident and studied example on a global scale was recorded during the lockdowns for pandemic of COVID-19. In that period, people’s dreams they suddenly became more intense, full of negative emotions and populated by frustrating limitations of freedom, in which dreamers felt physically blocked or oppressed. Why does this happen emotional transition between real life and sleep? According to neuroscientists, dreaming acts as a kind of “night therapy“, an evolutionary mechanism linked to the regulation of emotions and the consolidation of memory. Scientific theories such as that of “threat simulation”, as reported by the authors of the study, suggest that the brain uses the safe sleep stage to train yourself to handle dangerous situationsprocessing and disposing of the anguish accumulated during the day to help us wake up more serene. This is an extremely adaptive mechanism: the researchers observed that, with the end of the health restrictions, the emotions of the population’s dreams gradually “normalized”, returning to more positive tones over the following years. Therefore, we have further confirmation of the simulative and preparatory dimension of dreams, but today, after this study, we know better how much these are sewn on uson our anxieties or our joys, on our temperament and on our personal peculiarities.
When we dream, the brain activates a virtual world, the study
When we are awake, our thoughts are often focused on practical matters, bodily needs, or logical reasoning, and we are firmly in command of our actions. But as soon as we fall asleepthe mind radically changes script: dreams they abandon rational reflection and are transformed into vivid perceptual experiences, dominated by visual details, large explorable spaces and intense social interactions. When we dream we find ourselves immersed in a film of which we are often passive spectators, surrounded by bizarre events and sudden changes of scene. What is the scientific cause of this passage? As Italian research reminds us, during sleep, the brain abandon the “egocentric” frame of reference of waking, where everything revolves around our perspective and our purposes, to create a “allocentric” simulation. In other words, sort of virtual world independent in which we find ourselves inserted, disconnected from external reality. It’s as if the brain starts an advanced virtual reality generator for process fragments of memoriestransforming them into unpredictable and hyper-associative plotswhich bring with them some characteristics of real life, building a different context around them.
