A new study by researchers at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca has found that dreams are shaped by personality traits, daily experiences, and major life events, explaining why some dreams feel vivid and realistic while others appear fragmented or strange.
Published in Communications Psychology, the study analysed more than 3,700 dream reports and waking experience descriptions from 287 participants aged between 18 and 70.
The research combined psychology, sleep science, and artificial intelligence to better understand how dreams are formed.
According to the findings, individuals who reported higher levels of mind-wandering tended to experience dreams that were more disjointed and constantly shifting.
In contrast, participants who believed dreams carried meaning described richer, more immersive dream experiences with clearer narratives and detail.
Participants were asked to record their daily experiences over a two-week period. Researchers also collected data on sleep patterns, cognitive abilities, personality traits, and psychological characteristics. This allowed the team to compare what people experienced while awake with what appeared later in their dreams.
To examine the structure and meaning of dream reports, the researchers used natural language processing tools. These methods made it possible to analyse large volumes of dream descriptions and identify patterns that might be difficult to detect through manual analysis alone.
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The results challenge the idea that dreams are random. Instead, the study suggests dreams reflect a mix of internal factors such as sleep quality, personality, and interest in dreaming, along with external influences including significant social events.
The COVID-19 pandemic was highlighted as one such event that left a clear imprint on dream content.
By comparing daily life experiences with dream narratives, researchers found that the brain does not simply replay real events during sleep. Instead, it reorganises familiar settings like workplaces, hospitals, or schools into altered scenes that merge memories with imagined or anticipated situations. This process points to dreams as an active reconstruction of reality rather than a passive replay.
The study also drew on data collected by Sapienza University of Rome during the COVID-19 lockdown. That data showed dreams became more emotionally intense and frequently included themes of confinement and restriction. Over time, these patterns faded as people adjusted to the new reality.
“No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream,” said late psychologist Carl Jung.
Lead researcher Valentina Elce said the findings demonstrate that dreaming is deeply connected to both personal characteristics and lived experience. She added that the use of artificial intelligence was a key strength of the research.
The study found that NLP models were able to analyse dream content with accuracy comparable to that of human evaluators. Researchers believe this approach could support future work on consciousness, memory, and mental health, offering new tools to study how the sleeping brain processes reality.
The findings add to growing evidence that dreams are meaningful psychological experiences, shaped by who we are, what we live through, and how our minds work during sleep.
