If you ever found yourself on Sigmund Freud’s couch as he attempted to look under the proverbial bonnet of your mind, there’s a good chance you’d end up talking about your dreams.
Many of old Freud’s theories are based on dreams and dreaming. His stance was that dreams are the brain’s way of expressing subconscious desires and conflicts and so provide valuable insight into someone’s unconscious thinking.
To put it in his own words, “the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”.
Admittedly, this was over 120 years ago. Psychology, psychiatry and all other related disciplines have moved on since then. Dream interpretation – the notion that someone’s dreams provide a consistent, reliable, and understandable report of what’s happening in their subconscious – has, shall we say, fallen out of favour somewhat as a valid scientific discipline.
The belief that your dreams reveal your ‘true’ self is, at best, a considerable oversimplification of what turns out to be a fiendishly complicated process. However, recent research suggests concluding that dreams are just a random hodgepodge of meaningless neurological noise may also be wide of the mark.
This doesn’t automatically suggest that people saying things like “You dreamed of a plucked chicken singing Ave Maria on a burning kayak, which reveals you resent your father” are automatically correct. But there is now evidence which argues that the nature and content of dreams are shaped by, and so revealing of, certain aspects of our personality.
So, what do your dreams really reveal about you?
What dreams are made of
To truly appreciate what our dreams uncover about our inner selves, it’s important to understand what they are. Or, more appropriately, what they’re for.
Leaving aside the more esoteric beliefs about the nature of dreams, the neuroscientific explanation is that they’re a key process for memory consolidation. When we experience something during our waking hours our brains turn that information into a memory through a process called encoding.
This involves the creation of a bundle of neuronal connections, which is how the brain stores information. This bundle of connections forms a new memory trace, often described as a memory engram. These are essentially the individual units of memories in the brain.
But that’s only part one of the process. Much like how new books delivered to a library need to then be filed onto the right shelves to be practically useful, new memories need to be consolidated, where they are integrated into the existing long-term memory networks in our brains.
This happens when we’re asleep. As Prof Erin Wamsley from Furman University explains, “Sleep provides an optimal neurophysiological state to facilitate this process, allowing memory networks to be repeatedly reactivated in the absence of new sensory input.”
In lay terms, it’s much easier for our brains to sort out memories when it’s not still experiencing things, much like how it’s much easier to repair a road when it’s closed to traffic.
During consolidation, new memories are regularly linked up to older, seemingly unrelated ones. Much like software can’t be updated if there’s no power running through the device, our memories can’t be consolidated without activating the brain, effectively playing them in our heads. And so we dream.
This explains why our dreams can be so fantastical, yet simultaneously so familiar. They’re made of bits of memories. They’re put together according to some neurological pattern that we’re currently unable to recognise, but memories all the same, meaning every element of a dream is something we have encountered before.
This also means that, when faced with a thorny or difficult problem, the advice to “sleep on it” is sound, neuroscientifically speaking. Because when we dream, our brains integrate newly acquired information into our existing thinking systems, opening up different, unexpected pathways to do so, leaving us better equipped to think up solutions.
As Dr Alison Adcock of Duke University puts it, when we acquire new information, “our brain knits it all together in memory to help us make better choices – and that neat trick happens overnight.”
And what are we – what is our ‘self’, our personality – if not the sum total of our memories and experiences? Meaning, in the strictest possible sense, any and every dream is made up of the elements of who we are. So yes, they technically do reveal something about us.
However, ‘technically’ does not mean ‘practically’. Knowing the mechanisms of how dreaming works for everyone can be useful, but it is like knowing the dimensions of the box a package is delivered in – it doesn’t tell you anything about what’s inside.
So, what can our dreams reveal about us specifically?
Dream a little dream… of me?
A recently published study by researchers at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca reviewed thousands of descriptions of dreams provided by hundreds of people from all ages and, among other things, found that certain types of personalities tended to produce certain types of dreams.
Specifically, people who regularly let their mind wander, or ‘daydream’, tended to report more fragmented, rapidly changing dreams. Meanwhile, those who placed greater value on dreams and believed they have personal meaning reported more intense, lifelike, immersive dreams.
So, those with wandering minds have wandering dreams. And those who believe dreams are significant have more significant dreams. That all seems rather straightforward. Predictable, even. But a deeper delve into the neuroscience reveals more interesting details.
Many report that the details of their dream are hard to recall upon waking: they remember that they did dream, but not much beyond that. Others, though, find it much easier to remember the specifics of their subconscious nocturnal escapades.
Intriguingly, and perhaps counterintuitively, the same research also produced data which suggests those who experience regular mind-wandering, and thus more flitting, erratic dreams, are also the ones better able to recall the details of their dreams.
One explanation put forward is that daydreamers have more experience with processing more unpredictable, inconsistent internal states while they’re awake, so their brains are better at retaining information from similar experiences when they’re asleep. They’ve just had more practice.
After all, the term ‘daydreaming’ is not just a convenient label; key neurological areas, like the default mode network, are implicated in both day and night dreaming, so there’s overlap between the two processes.
Then there’s the finding that those who believe dreams are more meaningful have more vivid dreams. Isn’t that a bit… convenient? Perhaps. But that’s likely the wrong way round. People believe dreams are more significant and meaningful because they tend to have more vivid, intense dreams.
Why would this happen? One explanation centres around emotions, and how our brains are affected by them.
Emotional dreamer
Emotions are especially important for memory. Because they evolved before conscious thought and reason, emotions are what our memory systems use to identify what experiences are important. As a result, experiences with a significant emotional component or quality are much more likely to be remembered than neutral ones.
And dreams, as we know, are ultimately our brain’s way of processing memories. Particularly emotional memories. In fact, many argue that emotional processing – dealing with and sorting out the emotions that build up in our memories – can be an even more important function of dreaming than memory consolidation.
Which may explain why more regular, vivid dreaming is linked to better emotional health. As Dr Sara C. Mednick of the University of California, Irvine previously explained, “People who report dreaming show greater emotional memory processing, suggesting that dreams help us work through our emotional experiences”. In fact, research suggests that our dreaming brains prioritise processing negative emotions to deal with them faster, and let more neutral memories linger, or fade.
The upshot of all this is that more vivid dreams can help our brains deal with emotional memories better, but in a manner which often means our brains don’t retain the details. Meanwhile, more distractable, flitting brains retain the information, but at the cost of dealing with our emotional experiences, which requires more sustained effort from our neurological systems.
This could be taken to mean that if you experience emotionally vivid dreams in which you can’t recall the details, it suggests you’re a more emotionally healthy person.
By contrast, if your dreams are choppier but you can recall what happens in them with minimal effort, it may suggest you’re not spending enough time dealing with your emotions, are more avoidant and ‘flighty’, which may come back to bite you in the long run.
And so, our dreams can indeed reveal something about our personalities.
There are a lot of caveats there, though. For one, ‘prone to mind wandering’ and ‘believes dreams are meaningful’ are far from the only personality traits people can have. They’re just the ones that emerged as significant in this particular study. Many other personality qualities may be impactful on, or revealed by, our dreams.
More prosaically, the quality and duration of sleep is, inevitably, another big factor in our dreams, and our recall of them. So, if you’re unable to remember your dreams very well, it may mean you’re not sleeping well enough.
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A nightmare scenario
If dreams are how our brains process emotions, you’d expect the emotions we experience to affect the dreams we have. And that does seem to be the case. Consider the widely reported stress dream of having all your teeth fall out, or the significant spike in bad dreams concerning confinement and boundaries that were reported during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown.
In terms of personality, you’d expect more neurotic, more anxious personality types to experience more negative, more stress-infused dreams. And research suggests that is the case.
In a way, this is a good thing. If you’ve more negative emotions built up in your memory, then your brain will prioritise the processing of those when you’re dreaming, preventing them from festering and causing mental distress down the line.
Unfortunately, your brain’s ability to process negative emotions is finite. Sometimes, the triggering of too many unpleasant, stressful memories builds up, and infuses the whole dream scenario, like black ink dropped into a bowl of clear water. And so, we get nightmares – dreams from a dark mirror universe.
Nightmares are a well-established phenomenon, but because the sleeping brain isn’t an entirely unresponsive brain, an excessive buildup of fear and other negative emotions can disrupt the sleep and dreaming cycle and wake us up. They can even cause physical reactions via the fear response, hence the whole ‘waking up in a cold sweat’ cliché.
Unfortunately, this disruption of dreaming means the brain doesn’t properly process the emotions that caused the nightmare in the first place. The individual wakes up and resumes their stressful life, building up another day’s worth of stress and negative emotions, but now with sleep deprivation and an existing negative emotional backlog to contend with.
When they next sleep, their dreaming brain has fewer reserves and even more negative emotions to cope with – and it was already overwhelmed! Hence the nightmare. So it happens again. And then again. And a deeply unhelpful feedback loop begins.
This explains why increasing, persistent nightmares are often a sign of declining mental health, and indicative of an oncoming episode.
Granted, ‘being mentally unwell’ is not a personality type. But you can’t completely separate personality from mental wellbeing – they’re highly intertwined.
Perchance to dream
So, while our dreams may not tell us that much about our personalities, research suggests we can glean some useful information from them.
If you’re experiencing regular, emotionally vivid dreams that you can’t recall in detail, it may mean you have a healthy approach to your feelings and their expression. So, keep it up.
If your dreams are more erratic but oddly memorable, you might want to work on focusing more on what’s in front of you, rather than letting your mind wander. Whether intentionally or instinctively, you may be avoiding dealing with significant matters, which isn’t the healthiest approach in the long run.
And if you’re having regular bad stress-inducing dreams, or even nightmares, that usually means there’s something negative in your life that needs addressing. Possibly via medical or psychological help, if it’s something negative inside your own psyche.
And if all else fails, it’s important to do your best to have enough sleep, as challenging as that can often be in the modern world. But it’s invariably worth it, for the sake of your wellbeing.
In an ideal world, this will be the first example ever of a piece where readers can say “That science article made me want to fall asleep!” and mean it as a compliment.
One can but dream…
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