ArticleSleep2023
The memory sources of dreams: serial awakenings across sleep stages and time of night.
Article in Sleep, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset can influence later dream content in REM sleep: a pilot study.Frontiers in sleep · 2026Article
- Experimentally manipulating dream content by reactivating a remote emotional memory.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2026Article
- From living metaphors in impactful dreams to sublime disquietude and sublime enthrallment.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The American dream: Election night dreams predict overnight change in feelings about the election and the future.PloS one · 2026Article
- Sustaining transformations in psychoanalysis: an interdisciplinary case study on trauma, dreams, and memory reconsolidation.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Investigating dreams by strategically presenting sounds during REM sleep to reactivate waking experiences.Neuropsychologia · 2025Article
- Systems memory consolidation during sleep: oscillations, neuromodulators, and synaptic remodeling.BMB reports · 2025Review
- A dream EEG and mentation database.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Association between sleep and meteorology in late-onset depression patients.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- Memory, Sleep, Dreams, and Consciousness: A Perspective Based on the Memory Theory of Consciousness.Nature and science of sleep · 2025Article
- Experimentally inducing dreams of remote emotional memory.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2025Article
- We are the Sensors of Consciousness! A Review and Analysis on How Awakenings During Sleep Influence Dream Recall.Nature and science of sleep · 2025Article
- New strategies for the cognitive science of dreaming.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- Sensational Dreams: The Prevalence of Sensory Experiences in Dreaming.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- The Epistemic Limits of Impactful Dreams: Metacognition, Metaphoricity, and Sublime Feeling.Brain sciences · 2024Review
- Consciousness and sleep.Neuron · 2024Review
- Evidence of an active role of dreaming in emotional memory processing shows that we dream to forget.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Memory updating in dreams.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2024Article
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Abstract
Memories of waking-life events are incorporated into dreams, but their incorporation is not uniform across a night of sleep. This study aimed to elucidate ways in which such memory sources vary by sleep stage and time of night. Twenty healthy participants (11 F; 24.1 ± 5.7 years) spent a night in the laboratory and were awakened for dream collection approximately 12 times spread across early, middle, and late periods of sleep, while covering all stages of sleep (N1, N2, N3, REM). In the morning, participants identified and dated associated memories of waking-life events for each dream report, when possible. The incorporation of recent memory sources in dreams was more frequent in N1 and REM than in other sleep stages. The incorporation of distant memories from over a week ago, semantic memories not traceable to a single event, and anticipated future events remained stable throughout sleep. In contrast, the relative proportions of recent versus distant memory sources changed across the night, independently of sleep stage, with late-night dreams in all stages having relatively less recent and more remote memory sources than dreams earlier in the night. Qualitatively, dreams tended to repeat similar themes across the night and in different sleep stages. The present findings clarify the temporal course of memory incorporations in dreams, highlighting a specific connection between time of night and the temporal remoteness of memories. We discuss how dream content may, at least in part, reflect the mechanisms of sleep-dependent memory consolidation.
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