Dreams: How the Brain Creates New Realities
Researchers have discovered how dreams are formed. The brain does not replay the previous day during sleep; instead, it mixes experiences, emotions, and personality traits into new scenarios.
For a long time, dreams were considered either chaotic bursts of brain activity or interpretations of past events. However, researchers from the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy, have proven that the brain's nighttime activity is much more complex.
The researchers analyzed over 3,700 detailed reports of dreams from 287 participants aged 18 to 70 and published their findings in the journal Communications Psychology.
Volunteers recorded events during wakefulness and described their dreams immediately after waking up. Comparing this data revealed that the brain never copies reality exactly. Familiar everyday settings like work or school are often mixed with unfamiliar places and fragments from different life periods. The brain constructs a virtual reality at the intersection of real experiences, fears, and future expectations.
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To process the extensive text provided by volunteers, the authors used a specialized algorithm based on neural networks. The computer model studied the data and identified a clear link between the nature of dreams and individual personality traits. It turned out that people who tend to get distracted and “daydream” have fragmented and kaleidoscopic dreams, while those who attribute great importance to their dreams and seek hidden meanings experience emotionally rich, realistic, and highly detailed narratives.
Stress also leaves a deep mark on nighttime fantasies. By comparing reports collected in Italy during the Covid-19 lockdown with data from subsequent years, researchers noticed how dreams adapt to reality. During isolation, dreams often featured barriers, enclosed spaces, and other restrictions, but as the psyche adapted to new conditions, these anxious motifs gradually disappeared.
This research could potentially open up fundamentally new opportunities for modern neurobiology. By mathematically processing large data sets, researchers aim to deeply study how the brain processes experiences and helps the human psyche cope with stressful events and significant changes in the world.
