Dreaming

Is the fear of death keeping you awake? Recent research suggests that intense death anxiety predicts stronger insomnia symptoms, a link partially explained by a rise in severe nightmares.

A new study in Cell Reports reveals that the boundary between wakefulness and sleep is highly porous. Researchers found that humans can experience bizarre, dream-like states while awake and engage in rational planning while asleep.

New research shows that specific sleep patterns, like interrupted rest and falling asleep quickly, can predict lucid dreaming in people with PTSD. This could eventually help therapists use conscious dreaming to treat trauma-related nightmares.

New research reveals that lucid dreamers can successfully transform their perceived bodies to experience life as animals or another gender, demonstrating the extreme adaptability of the subconscious mind.

A fascinating new sleep study tracks the anatomy of demonic nightmares. Scientists found that these terrifying dreams often begin as minor threats days in advance before culminating in severe attacks that leave dreamers paralyzed with fear.

A new study reveals that waking mind wandering is just as densely packed with bizarre elements as nighttime dreaming. While dreams feature slowly transforming impossibilities, daydreams are marked by abrupt jumps in logic.

New research indicates that dreams often act as a simulation for social hurdles. By analyzing hundreds of dream reports, scientists found that themes like status and self-protection frequently organize the content of our sleep narratives.

A recent study published in Neuroscience of Consciousness provides evidence that dreaming about a specific problem helps people find solutions. Researchers used sound cues during sleep to successfully guide dream content toward unsolved puzzles.

A new neuroimaging study suggests that people who frequently control their dreams share distinct structural brain patterns. These networks bridge the areas responsible for self-reflection, visual imagery, and cognitive control.

Do waking perceptual traits influence our sleep? New research indicates that people with synesthesia have unique dream patterns, providing evidence that our individual brain structures actively shape our imagination long after we fall asleep.

Job loss takes a hidden toll on the sleeping mind. By analyzing thousands of online dream reports, researchers found that unemployment strips away nighttime surprises and visual observations, mirroring the mental disengagement people experience during waking hours.

An international team has created the largest-ever public database of brain activity and dream reports. A first analysis reveals that during deep-sleep dreams, the brain exhibits patterns resembling wakefulness.

A new study reports that dreams featuring supernatural events can influence a person’s daily feelings of closeness to God. Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the research shows this effect can be delayed by several days.

Sexual dreams often mirror waking psychological patterns. University students who scored higher in sensation seeking, extraversion, and neuroticism tended to report more vivid, joyful, or unusual sexual dreams, while anxiety and depression fueled more aversive and unsettling experiences.

People who score higher on neuroticism are more likely to experience frequent nightmares, according to research published in Dreaming.