While material from waking life is often represented in dreams, it is less clear whether and how dreams impact waking life in return. Here, we assessed whether dream mood and content from home diaries predict subsequent waking mood using both subjective self-report and an objective automated word detection approach. Subjective ratings of dream and morning mood were highly correlated within participants for both negative and positive valence, suggesting that dream mood persists into waking. Text analyses revealed similar relationships between affect words in dreams and morning mood. Moreover, dreams referencing death or the body were related to worse morning mood, as was first-person singular pronoun usage (e.g., “I”). Dreams referencing leisure or ingestion, or including first-person plural pronouns (e.g., “we”), were related to better morning mood. Together, these results suggest that subjective experiences during sleep, while often overlooked, may be an important contributor to the emotion processing functions of sleep.
Evidence suggests that dream content, such as dreaming about a learning task, is associated with improved task performance following sleep. Given links between sleep and language learning, we conducted a morning nap study to assess whether dream content correlates with improvement on a sign language learning task. We collected data from 16 participants who completed a sign language vocabulary learning and recall task before and after a 2-hr nap opportunity. Participants were awakened from REM sleep and asked to report a dream and rate the extent to which their dream incorporated elements of the laboratory or the task on a 1–9 Likert scale, and an independent judge additionally scored laboratory incorporation in dreams. Results showed that lab-related dreams were associated with improved performance on the task following sleep. Overall, the results are in line with recent findings that dream content correlates with learning, here extended to a sign language task. The results could be interpreted in several ways: Dream content may be influenced by trait factors (cognitive capacity and motivation) that correspond with learning, or dream content could either reflect or actively enhance underlying memory consolidation during sleep.
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