Dreams may amplify rather than soothe emotional reactions to a painful election loss, study suggests

Americans who dreamed about the 2024 U.S. presidential election on election night tended to feel worse about the election and the future the next morning than those who did not, according to a study published in PLOS One. This pattern appeared among Democrats and, to a lesser extent, Independents, but not among Republicans. The finding runs counter to the idea that dreaming helps soften emotional reactions.

Large-scale events that affect entire societies, such as terrorist attacks, pandemics, and national elections, can influence people’s sleep and dreams. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks and during the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans reported dreaming about these events and experiencing more intense dreams than usual.

Scientists have suggested that dreaming may help people process emotional experiences and regulate their emotional responses, particularly during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when many vivid dreams occur. During REM sleep, brain regions involved in emotional processing, including the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex, are especially active. Emotionally significant experiences are frequently incorporated into dreams during this phase.

Some studies have found that people react less strongly to previously encountered emotional stimuli after sleeping, although the findings have not been entirely consistent. Other research suggests that dreaming about emotionally significant experiences may be associated with improved mood and reduced emotional distress, particularly when dreams contain more positive emotions.

Dreams may also influence how people imagine their future, including both their personal future and the future of the communities or countries to which they belong. Research has found that people in Western societies generally tend to imagine their personal future more positively than their country’s future, although major events such as the COVID-19 pandemic can temporarily change these patterns. Because dreaming may contribute to both emotional regulation and memory processing, researchers have proposed that dreams about major collective events could influence how people emotionally interpret those events and imagine what lies ahead.

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Study author William H. Livingston and colleagues investigated how the 2024 U.S. presidential election, an event of great collective importance, was represented in Americans’ dreams. They expected that many people would dream about the election that night because of its emotional importance. Based on the idea that dreaming helps regulate emotions, they also predicted that people who dreamed about the election would feel less negative about it, and more positive about their own future and the country’s future, the following morning.

The participants were 931 U.S. adults recruited through the online platform Prolific. Their average age was 42, and 494 were women, 434 were men, and three identified as another gender. About 43% identified as Republicans, 38% as Democrats, and 19% as Independents. Participants received $2.50 for completing both surveys.

Participants completed two surveys on consecutive days. The first was completed on the morning of Election Day, November 5, 2024, before any polls had closed. The second was completed between 8:00 and 9:54 a.m. Eastern time the next day, after the Associated Press had declared Donald Trump the winner at 5:35 a.m., so all participants knew the outcome by then.

In the first survey, participants reported their political identity, on a scale ranging from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, and rated how they felt about the election (“How are you feeling about the election and the events surrounding it?”), their personal future (“Overall, how do you feel about the future of your personal life?”), and the future of the U.S. (“Overall, how do you feel about the future of the United States of America?”). They also completed a standard measure of positive and negative mood. At the end, participants were asked to try to remember their dreams that night.

In the second survey, participants described any dreams they recalled from the previous night and reported whether the dreams were related to the election. They then answered the same questions about their mood and their feelings about the election, their personal future, and the future of the country.

About 71% of participants reported a dream from election night, and 49% of those said their dream was related to the election. The researchers also had an AI language model, GPT-4o mini, classify the dream reports after checking its ratings against those of human raters on a subset of dreams. It classified 44% of the reported dreams as election-related, closely matching participants’ own reports, and nearly a quarter of all dreams directly referred to the candidates or other imagery from the 2024 election.

Simply recalling a dream was not associated with overnight changes in how participants felt about the election, their personal future, or the future of the country. Reflecting the election outcome, Democrats felt more negative about the election and the future the morning after, while Republicans felt more positive. Independents’ feelings shifted only slightly.

Among participants who recalled a dream, those who dreamed about the election showed a larger negative shift in feelings about the election overnight than those who did not. This pattern was driven by Democrats and Independents, who felt worse about the election if they had dreamed about it. Republicans felt similarly about the election regardless of whether they dreamed about it.

A similar pattern emerged for feelings about the future. Democrats who dreamed about the election woke up feeling more negative about both their personal future and the future of the country. Independents who dreamed about the election felt more negative about their personal future, but not about the country’s future, while Republicans’ outlook did not depend on whether they had dreamed about the election.

Before the election, people who later dreamed about it did not differ from others in how they felt about the election or the future, although they did report more negative mood that day. The links with dreaming were small in the sample as a whole but moderate within the Democratic and Independent groups.

Dreams that touched on the election only indirectly, such as dreams about competitions or debates, or that involved other elections, were linked to larger overnight changes in participants’ outlook on their personal future than dreams unrelated to the election. Dreams that directly depicted the 2024 election were not.

“Contrary to our expectations, dreaming about the election was associated with intensified emotions toward it, toward the personal future, and toward the collective future. These observations contradict the longstanding hypothesis that dreaming functions to reduce emotional reactivity following an emotional event, instead suggesting that dreaming about an experience is associated with greater reactivity,” study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the role dreams play in people’s psychological experiences. However, it should be noted that the study was correlational, so it cannot show that dreaming caused the changes in participants’ feelings. People who were more invested in the election or watched more coverage before bed, for example, may have been both more likely to dream about it and more likely to feel strongly about the result.

All data came from self-reports, and the researchers did not collect sleep data. It is possible that sleep on election night was disrupted, which could have made participants more likely to remember their dreams. The study also examined only a single night, so it cannot speak to whether dreaming helps people adjust to emotional events over longer periods.

The paper, “The American dream: Election night dreams predict overnight change in feelings about the election and the future,” was authored by William H. Livingston, Adam L. Putnam, and Erin J. Wamsley.