DREAM / The Prime Minister resigns and wakes up under the Parisian bridge!

 Kliko këtu për të tjera
Voxpress:

The strange moment in the morning that decides which dreams you'll remember

2026-04-29 18:54:37Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
The strange moment in the morning that decides which dreams you'll remember
Photo illustration

There is a moment in the morning, just before we open our eyes, when we are no longer asleep, but not yet fully awake. In that brief moment, the memory of dreams is still fresh, before the light and routine of the day wash them away, like sand drifting away from a shore.

It is precisely this "window" that the researchers exploited. "With a recorder next to the bed, we asked the volunteers to use that moment and tell everything they had experienced in their dream," explains Valentina Elce, a neuroscience researcher.

A large archive of dreams

The study involved 287 volunteers who were asked to describe their dreams every morning for about two weeks. In total, over 3,700 dreams were collected, which were then analyzed and published in the journal Communications Psychology.

But the researchers didn't just focus on the content of their dreams. "At random moments during the day, we also asked the volunteers to tell us what they were thinking at that moment," adds Elce, who works at the MoMiLab (Molecular Mind Lab). The goal was to find the connection between daytime and nighttime experiences.

The analysis was then supported by artificial intelligence, which identified similarities between daytime and dream narratives, connections that turned out to be much stronger than expected.

How dreams relate to everyday life

According to researchers, people often think they haven't been dreaming because they only call very clear, filmy scenes "dreams." In fact, even vague sensations and fragments of memories fall into this category.

In many cases, dreams turn out to have direct roots in the events of the day. For example, a volunteer who was worried about buying some furniture had a dream of himself walking through a brightly colored forest.

Another case was of a girl who was experiencing tension in a personal relationship. In her dream, she was climbing a mountain while another person tried to pull her down, but she kept climbing, while a rainbow grew fuller as she got closer to the top.

How the brain "regulates" emotions

“During the day, volunteers’ narratives were often focused on themselves and their personal emotions,” Elce explains. “While at night, experiences were reprocessed in a more detached way. People became less involved observers, and negative emotions were often mitigated.”

According to her, one possible function of dreams is precisely to review and soften the experiences of the day, as a way of making them more bearable.

In fact, negative dreams were found to be the most frequent, even for events that were neutral during the day. However, this may be a mechanism for the brain to adapt to difficult situations.

From pandemic to changing dreams

The data was collected between 2020 and 2024, a period that includes the time of the pandemic. The researchers noticed that over the years, dreams became less emotionally charged and less anxious.

The next challenge for scientists is to understand why some daytime experiences are "selected" by the brain to appear in dreams, while others are not. Emotions and connections between memories are part of the answer, but the exact mechanism remains unclear.

It all begins in that brief moment of the morning, when the dream has not yet completely disappeared and reality has not yet taken control.


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

Video

SHIKO KANALIN NE YOUTUBE
×