What makes us more likely to remember dreams?

In the early stages of the Covid pandemic, there were increased numbers of reports of odd dreams, and interest arose as more and more people felt that they were recalling their dreams more frequently than before. While we know from previous research that traumatic experiences and distress can be associated with an increased number of dreams which revolve around distressing content, this 'abrupt surge' in dream recall, as Valentina Elce and colleagues call it in their recent publication, is slightly different.

Exactly what makes someone more likely to remember a dream isn't well understood. As Elce and team find out in their latest work, however, there are some factors that could lead someone to be more prone to recalling their dreams. In their experiment, published this month in Communications Psychology, the team explored dream reports from 204 healthy Italian adults between March 2020 and March 2024.

Each participant provided a collection of spoken dream reports over the span of 15 days, as well as actigraphic data (movement data taken while asleep, which can point towards particular stages of sleep), and responses to a host of questionnaires probing their anxiety levels, mind wandering, and sleeping habits. Participants also shared information on their beliefs about dreams with an 'attitude to dreams' measure, featuring questions such as "dreams are a good way of learning about my true feelings" and "dreams are random nonsense from the brain". By the time data collection was complete, the researchers had over 2,900 dream report recordings to analyse against these various measures.

Analyses showed that those with a positive attitude towards dreaming, high levels of mind wandering, and longer periods spent in lighter stages of sleep were significantly more likely to remember the content of their dreams upon waking.

Individual differences such as age also played a role. Those on the younger end of the participant pool (who, as a whole, were aged between 18 and 70) were more likely recall their dreams, in general. More mature participants, on the other hand, tended to report the sensation of having dreamt, while the details escaped them— an experience also known as "white dreams". This finding in particular may suggest age-related changes to the ability to recall dreams.

Interestingly, participants also reported seasonal changes in their ability to remember their dreams. Winter, they shared, was associated with less dream recall versus spring. This seems to hint that there may be some kind of circadian rhythm, or environmental factor that affects the extent to which we remember dreams.

The authors hope that the data in this study can serve as a benchmark for dream recall in healthy populations, and offer a point of comparison for future research with clinical populations. In time, they believe that it's possible such research could better establish changes in dreaming as a diagnostic tool. Larger, more diverse data sets of a similar nature would likely fortify such efforts.

Read the paper in full:
Elce, V., Bergamo, D., Bontempi, G., Pedreschi, B., Bellesi, M., Giacomo Handjaras, & Bernardi, G. (2025). The individual determinants of morning dream recall. Communications Psychology, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00191-z

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