Dreaming is associated with improved memory consolidation and emotion regulation

A night spent dreaming may help you forget the ordinary and better process the extreme, according to new research from the University of California, Irvine. New work from researchers in the UC Irvine Sleep and Cognition Laboratory examined how dream memories and mood influence memory consolidation and emotion regulation the next day.

Results published recently in Scientific Reports indicate a trade-off in which emotionally charged memories are prioritized but their severity is reduced.

"We found that people who report dreams show greater emotional memory processing, suggesting that dreams help us process our emotional experiences," said lead study author Sarah Mednick, UC Irvine professor of cognitive science and director of the lab..

"This is important 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 reactions to waking experiences, prioritizing negative memories over neutral ones and reducing our emotional response to next day."

Lead author Jing Zhang, who received her PhD in cognitive science from UC Irvine in 2023 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, added: “Our work provides the first empirical evidence for the active involvement of dreams in sleep addiction. Processing of emotional memory, which suggests that dreaming after an emotional experience may help us feel better the next morning."

The study included 125 women—75 via Zoom and 50 in the Sleep and Cognition Lab—who were in their 30s and were part of a larger research project examining the effects of the menstrual cycle on sleep.

Each session for subjects began at 7:30 p.m. With an emotional picture task in which they viewed a series of pictures depicting negative and neutral situations (such as a car accident or a field of grass), rating each on a nine-point scale for the intensity of the feelings evoked..

Participants then immediately took the same test with new images and only a selection of previously viewed images. In addition to rating their emotional responses, the women had to indicate whether each image was old or new, which helped the researchers develop a baseline for both memory and emotional response.

The subjects then went to sleep either at home or in one of the private bedrooms of the sleep laboratory. Everyone wore a ring that tracked their sleep-wake patterns. When they woke up the next day, they rated whether they had dreamed the previous night and, if so, recorded the details of the dream and overall mood in a sleep diary, using a seven-point scale ranging from extremely negative to extremely positive.

Research protocol. At 8 pm, participants memorized images from the EPT (Emotional Picture Task) task and were immediately tested. Participants then slept either at home or in the laboratory, depending on the testing method—remote or in-person, respectively. Upon awakening, participants reported the presence and content of their dreams and completed a delayed EPT test. Source: Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-58170-z

Two hours after waking, the women repeated a second emotional picture task to measure memory of and response to the pictures.

"Unlike typical sleep diary studies, which collect data over several weeks to find out whether daytime experiences appear in dreams, we used a one-night study that focused on emotionally charged material and asked whether dream memory is associated with with changes in memory and emotional response," Zhang said.

Participants who reported dreams were better able to remember and react less strongly to negative images compared to neutral ones, which was absent in those who did not remember dreams. In addition, the more positive the dream, the more positively the participant rated the negative images the next day.

"This research gives us new insight into the active role of dreams in how we naturally process our daily experiences, and may lead to interventions that increase the number of dreams to help people cope with difficult life situations," Mednick said. p>