IMT Lucca study of 200 adults shows mind-wandering lovers, light sleepers, youth and spring testers remember dreams best — think about them immediately upon waking. Age, sunlight and daydreaming boost vivid recall over “white dreams” in older folks during deep winter sleep.
If you think about your dreams while you are awake, you are more likely to remember them in the morning. Italian scientists published the research findings, according to the Daily Mail.
They are trying to understand why some people remember their dreams, while others do not. Experiments with 200 people showed that age and season can also influence whether people remember their dreams.
Scientists from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca asked people to wear special devices to monitor their sleep and use tape recorders to remember their dreams for 15 days.
People aged 18 to 70 who wanted to take part in the experiment had to take some psychological tests before. These tests looked at how anxious they were, how interested they were in dreams, and if they often daydream.
The researchers described mind wandering as a tendency to stop focusing on tasks and instead think about thoughts or feelings that have nothing to do with the task at hand. This is similar to daydreaming.
The results showed clear patterns of who was more likely to remember their dreams — and in great detail. People who like to daydream and think it’s good for them, as well as those who often let their minds wander, are more likely to remember their dreams.
The study also showed that people who experienced prolonged periods of ‘light sleep’ – as opposed to deeper, more restful sleep – were more likely to remember their dreams. Younger people usually remembered their dreams better than older people. Older people were more likely to experience what the researchers called ‘white dreams’ — a state in which they remembered having had a dream the previous night but could not recall the specific details.
The authors, who published their research in the journal Communications Psychology, suggest that age-related changes in memory may affect our ability to recall dreams. People who took part in the sleep experiment in the spring remembered their dreams more often than those who did so in the winter.
Scientists say that a certain type of dreaming is an early sign of dementia or Parkinson’s disease. The researchers think that this could be because of the influence of sunlight, which is stronger in the warmer months, playing a potential role in the ability to remember dreams.
Professor Giulio Bernardi, who is an expert in psychology and wrote the study, said that the results suggest that remembering dreams is a complicated process affected by many different things.
‘Our results suggest that how well we remember our dreams is not just a matter of chance, but a reflection of how personality traits, cognitive traits and sleep dynamics interact,’ he said.
The authors added that they hope the study will be a starting point for similar research into remembering dreams in the future.