Back

The semantics of dreams

Elce, V.; Bontempi, G.; Scarpelli, S.; Pedreschi, B.; De Gennaro, L.; Pietrini, P.; Bellesi, M.; Bernardi, G.; Handjaras, G.

2025-05-21 neuroscience
10.1101/2025.05.20.654459 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Dreams are universal yet deeply personal experiences. While memory and personal concerns influence dream content, the impact of other individual, generalizable traits remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we built a multimodal dataset including dream and wakefulness reports, alongside demographic, psychometric, cognitive, and sleep-related measures in a large adult cohort. Natural language processing characterized the semantic features that quantitatively distinguish dream from wakefulness reports, with this distinction significantly modulated by individual-specific factors. Longitudinal and cross-sample analyses further demonstrated that major external events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, affect dream content, leaving lasting traces. Overall, the findings highlight a dynamic interplay between stable individual traits and external events in shaping dream experiences, offering novel insights into the cognitive and emotional architecture of dreaming.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
Neuroscience of Consciousness
◐ 16 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
15.1%
2
Scientific Reports
○ 3612 papers in training set
Top 2%
12.7%
3
Nature Communications
○ 5641 papers in training set
Top 17%
11.0%
4
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
● 2444 papers in training set
Top 4%
9.7%
5
iScience
○ 1154 papers in training set
Top 4%
4.3%
50% of probability mass above
6
Communications Biology
○ 993 papers in training set
Top 4%
4.0%
7
Scientific Data
○ 209 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
3.4%
8
eLife
● 5828 papers in training set
Top 34%
3.2%
9
Translational Psychiatry
○ 260 papers in training set
Top 2%
2.8%
10
Nature Human Behaviour
○ 95 papers in training set
Top 0.8%
2.4%
11
Molecular Psychiatry
○ 282 papers in training set
Top 3%
2.1%
12
Communications Medicine
○ 113 papers in training set
Top 2%
2.1%
13
Advanced Science
○ 286 papers in training set
Top 4%
2.1%
14
NeuroImage
○ 903 papers in training set
Top 4%
1.9%
15
npj Digital Medicine
○ 118 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.3%
16
Nature Neuroscience
○ 252 papers in training set
Top 4%
1.3%
17
Communications Psychology
○ 22 papers in training set
Top 0.3%
1.1%
18
PLOS ONE
● 5266 papers in training set
Top 55%
1.1%
19
Sleep Medicine
○ 19 papers in training set
Top 0.3%
1.1%
20
Frontiers in Psychology
○ 56 papers in training set
Top 1%
1.1%
21
Sleep
◐ 58 papers in training set
Top 0.6%
1.1%
22
Science Advances
● 1243 papers in training set
Top 25%
1.1%
23
Current Biology
○ 665 papers in training set
Top 9%
1.0%
24
Journal of Sleep Research
○ 36 papers in training set
Top 0.5%
1.0%
25
Human Brain Mapping
○ 329 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.6%
26
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
○ 17 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
0.6%