The nature of delayed dream incorporation (‘dream‐lag effect’): Personally significant events persist, but not major daily activities or concerns

Eichenlaub, Jean-Baptiste; Rijn, Elaine van; Phelan, Mairéad; Ryder, Larnia; Gaskell, M. Gareth; Lewis, Penelope A.; Walker, Matthew P.; Blagrove, Mark

doi:10.1111/jsr.12697

Cited by 16 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Since daily perceived stress did not predict the dream valence experienced on the subsequent night, models testing for potential a dream-lag effect (i.e., increased incorporation in dreams of events having occurred 5–7 days prior to the dream) 52,53 were also computed post hoc. Separate datasets pairing daily perceived stress levels from previous days (i.e., two to seven days prior to recalled dreams) with reported valence of subsequently recalled dream were generated.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting the affective tone of everyday dreams: A prospective study of state and trait variables

Samson-Daoust

Julien

Beaulieu-Prévost

et al. 2019

Sci Rep

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Although emotions are reported in a large majority of dreams, little is known about the factors that account for night-to-night and person-to-person variations in people’s experience of dream affect. We investigated the relationship between waking trait and state variables and dream affect by testing multilevel models intended to predict the affective valence of people’s everyday dreams. Participants from the general population completed measures of personality and trauma history followed by a three-week daily journal in which they noted dream recall, valence of dreamed emotions and level of perceived stress for the day as well as prior to sleep onset. Within-subject effects accounted for most of the explained variance in the reported valence of dream affect. Trait anxiety was the only variable that significantly predicted dream emotional valence at the between-subjects level. In addition to highlighting the need for more fine-grained measures in this area of research, our results point to methodological limitations and biases associated with retrospective estimates of general dream affect and bring into focus state variables that may best explain observed within-subject variance in emotions experienced in everyday dreams.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting the affective tone of everyday dreams: A prospective study of state and trait variables

Samson-Daoust

Julien

Beaulieu-Prévost

et al. 2019

Sci Rep

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“…Another plausible hypothesis refers to the possibility that waking emotions are expressed in dreams across a different time span than those measured in our study. For instance, in analogy with data on the delayed incorporation of waking events in dreams [ 21 , 22 , 23 ], emotions experienced on a certain day could be reflected in the dream with a few days’ lag. However, our exploratory analysis on the participants reporting their dream with a few days’ delay from the beginning of data collection (and thus providing more than one WAKE24hr scale) does not support this idea.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, the possibilities are multiplied when considering emotional valence: in fact, a common mechanism can be hypothesized for the expression in dreams of both positive and negative emotions (e.g., one of the mechanisms proposed above), or else, they could undergo different pathways (e.g., positive emotions dominate in dreams when negative ones are prevalent during wake and vice versa, etc.). Finally, different hypotheses may also be put forward regarding the time span over which these mechanisms unfold: for instance, daytime emotions may be processed in the immediately subsequent dream or with a few days’ lag (in analogy with literature on the “dream lag” and “day-residue” effect [ 21 , 22 , 23 ]); or each dream may process emotions generated and/or experienced during wider daytime spans (e.g., the last few weeks, the general “time period”), etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relationships between Dream and Previous Wake Emotions Assessed through the Italian Modified Differential Emotions Scale

et al. 2020

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Despite the increasing interest in sleep and dream-related processes of emotion regulation, their reflection into wake and dream emotional experience remains unclear. Here, we aimed to assess dream emotions and their relationships with wake emotions through the modified Differential Emotions Scale (Fredrickson, 2003), which includes a broad array of both positive and negative emotions. The scale has been first validated on 212 healthy Italian participants, in two versions: a WAKE-2wks form, assessing the frequency of 22 emotions over the past 2 weeks, and a WAKE-24hr form, assessing their intensity over the past 24 h. Fifty volunteers from the wider sample completed the WAKE-24hr mDES for several days until a dream was recalled, and dream emotions were self-reported using the same scale. A bifactorial structure was confirmed for both mDES forms, which also showed good validity and reliability. Though Positive and Negative Affect (average intensity of positive and negative items, PA, and NA, respectively) were balanced in dreams, specific negative emotions prevailed; rmANOVA showed a different pattern (prevalence of PA and positive emotions) in wake (both WAKE-2wks and WAKE-24hr), with a decrease of PA and an increase of NA in the dream compared to previous wake. No significant regression model emerged between waking and dream affect, and exploratory analyses revealed a stable proportion of PA and NA (with prevailing PA) over the 3 days preceding the dream. Our findings highlight a discontinuity between wake and dream affect and suggest that positive and negative emotions experienced during wake may undertake distinct sleep-related regulation pathways.

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“…Dreaming is a universal experience that occurs during sleep. There is evidence for a 7-day U-shaped timescale of incorporation of memories of experiences when awake into dreams, in which events from 1 or 2 days before the dream, and from 5 to 7 days before the dream, are preferentially incorporated into dream content (e.g., Nielsen and Powell, 1992;Nielsen et al, 2004;Blagrove et al, 2011;van Rijn et al, 2015;Eichenlaub et al, 2019). The recent incorporations are termed the day-residue effect, and the delayed incorporations the dream-lag effect.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this situation, external judges who do not know participants' information rated correlations between participants' waking events and dream reports. Evidence showed that when compared with the independent-judge method, the self-report method has the advantage of studying the dream-lag effect (for a discussion, see the introduction section in Eichenlaub et al, 2019). However, in our opinion, when a study aims to explore whether some personality traits can affect conscious experiences' incorporation into dreams, the independent-judge method is more suitable than the self-report method.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Paradigm for Matching Waking Events Into Dream Reports

Bin

et al. 2020

Front. Psychol.

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In this study, participants recorded their waking events (Personal significant events, PSEs/Major concerns, MCs) and dream reports for 7 days. These events and dreams were paired by the same day (216 PSEs-dreams pairs and 215 MCs-dreams pairs). Then participants were instructed to both find similar features (characters, objects, locations, actions, emotions, and themes) of their events-dreams pairs and give a match score of their events-dreams pairs. Besides, we proposed a method for independent judges to match waking events into dreams (the external ratings). The rating standard of the external-ratings was to look for similar behaviors between events and dreams. Based on this rating standard, three independent judges were instructed to rate participants' events-dreams pairs. Firstly, we compared the two kinds of methods of self-ratings. Spearman correlations showed that the two methods were significantly correlated with each other. These results suggested that the sum of different kinds of similar features could be used to represent self-ratings reported of the degree of the correlation between a waking event and a dream. Regression correlations showed that for PSEs-dreams pairs, characters, actions, emotions, and themes were similar features that affected the degree of the correlation between an event and a dream of the same day, and for MCs-dreams pairs, characters, locations, emotions, and themes were similar features that affected the degree of the correlation between an event and a dream of the same day. These results suggested that different kinds of similar features had different influence on the self-ratings' evaluation for the degree of matching between waking event and dream. Secondly, we compared the rating results of the self-ratings and the rating results of the external-ratings. Spearman correlations showed that the results of the self-ratings were significantly correlated with the results of the externalratings. So this study's method for the external ratings may be suitable for future studies. Besides, as the external ratings of this study can rate dream metaphors, we also made a short discussion on dream metaphors. Future studies can use the method to explore dream metaphors.

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The nature of delayed dream incorporation (‘dream‐lag effect’): Personally significant events persist, but not major daily activities or concerns

Cited by 16 publications

References 32 publications

Predicting the affective tone of everyday dreams: A prospective study of state and trait variables

Predicting the affective tone of everyday dreams: A prospective study of state and trait variables

Relationships between Dream and Previous Wake Emotions Assessed through the Italian Modified Differential Emotions Scale

A Paradigm for Matching Waking Events Into Dream Reports

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