Khaberni - Dreams may initially seem random with no rule or system, but a new study conducted in Italy has identified a series of factors that control dreams, making them appear sometimes realistic and vibrant, and other times, fantastical or surreal with no relation to reality.
Dreams are usually influenced by each individual's personality and the life experiences they undergo during waking hours, and even by some global events that may affect a person's personal life.
The study, conducted by a research team from the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies located in Lucca, Italy, included 287 individuals aged between 18 and 70. Over two weeks, researchers monitored the daily life events of the volunteers, and collected detailed data related to sleep patterns, cognitive abilities, and personal psychological traits.
The researchers used an advanced system powered by artificial intelligence to analyze the content and structures of the volunteers’ dreams, allowing the study of dreams in a methodical manner with measurable standards.
The results showed that dreams are not random or chaotic, but rather reflect complex interactions between internal factors like personality traits and sleep patterns, and external influences such as global events like the COVID-19 pandemic, for example.
By comparing the events that occur in a person's waking life with what they narrate about the dreams they experienced in their sleep, researchers found that the human mind does not merely retrieve daytime events during nighttime sleep in the form of dreams. Instead, it restructures these events to the extent that familiar places such as work, school, or hospitals do not usually appear in dreams as they are in reality; they often appear with different qualities influenced by various factors including the sleeper's perspective and viewpoint on those places, even though they still appear as if they are real, vibrant places.
The experiment confirmed that dreams actually reconstruct the world of reality, mixing memories with fantastical and anticipated experiences, leading to the creation of new scenarios that may appear in virtual or even surreal forms.
Valentina Elise, the head of the research team from the IMT Institute, said: "The results of the experiment have shown that dreams are not just reflections of past experiences, but are a dynamic process that forms according to each person's identity and lifestyle," she added in remarks relayed by the website SciTech Daily, specializing in scientific research: "By collecting a large amount of data on the volunteers through computational applications, the research team was able to discover patterns in dream content that had not been detectable before."
The study published by the journal Communication Psychology, which specializes in psychology, confirmed that dreams vary significantly from one person to another, and that someone characterized by daydreaming, for example, often has fragmented and constantly changing dreams. In contrast, people who believe in the importance of dreams usually have richer and more vibrant dreams compared to others.
The researchers also monitored the impact of global events on dreams, showing that data collected by researchers from the University of Sapienza in Rome during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and later compared with the results achieved by the IMT Institute team, indicated that dreams during that period were emotional and often related to ideas of restrictions. As the pandemic began to subside, these patterns of dreams receded, suggesting that the change in dream content is linked to the psychological reaction that bubbles up in an individual regarding major global events.
The researchers focused on three main factors during the study: the quantitative determination of similarities or differences between what the volunteer sees in a dream and what they relate about their life experiences during waking hours, to establish the extent of daily life events' impact on dream implications. Secondly, measuring cognitive traits and personality and sleep patterns of each person on the content of the dreams they experience during sleep and their ability to recall them after waking up. Thirdly, whether global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which lasted about four years and acted as a psychological pressure factor, cast their shadows on the implications of dreams for individuals who underwent this experience, monitoring how quickly the nature of dreams changes with the external influences that an individual is exposed to personally or in society at large.
The study also highlighted the significant role that artificial intelligence can play in understanding and interpreting dreams. The AI program used by the researchers during the experiment was able to detect the meanings and composition of the dreams narrated by the volunteers with remarkable accuracy, surpassing the capabilities of human experts who evaluated these dreams independently. This opens wide the doors for employing artificial intelligence technologies in fields like consciousness, memory, and mental health on a broader scale and with greater consistency.
