It happens that you wake up with a scene that seems to have no manners. A room I’ve never seen, a person from years ago, a tiny fear that has become enormous, a detail from the day before stuck in the middle of something that resembles a badly shot film yet strangely ours. Dreams do this: they arrive with pieces of reality, they move them, they deform them, they glue them to emotions that perhaps had remained still in a corner during the day.
Science, on this terrain, is bringing order without completely removing the mystery. A study published on April 28, 2026 on Communications Psychology he systematically analyzed the content of dreams, showing that those nocturnal images arise from the intertwining of what we experience and the way we are made. The work examined a large set of data: 287 adults between 18 and 69 years old, over 3,700 overall reports of dreams and waking experiences, with a main group collected between 2020 and 2024 and a second group referring to the first lockdown of 2020. In the main dataset alone, 1,687 dream reports and 1,679 reports of waking experiences were collected; in total, between the two groups, the dream reports analyzed were 2,038.
They are not random images
The most interesting data concerns precisely this type of internal workshop. Dreams collect materials from everyday life, but they treat them in their own way. A face encountered, a conversation, a place, a tension left open can reappear at night in another form. Sometimes they become clear images, other times a bizarre sequence, full of strange spaces, multiple characters, situations that in waking life we would dismiss as absurd.
The study speaks of a continuity between wakefulness and sleep, together with a very clear transformation. Compared to the stories of waking experiences, dreams are more perceptive, more visual, more spatial, populated by concrete details, presences, unusual events. The sleeping mind seems to take our worries and our memories, then build an internal simulation: less news, more editing.
Quite stable characteristics of the person also enter into this montage. What counts is the interest in dreams, what counts is the tendency to mind-wandering, that is, that mind that goes away on its own during the day, what counts is the subjective quality of sleep. Those who attach importance to dreams tend to produce more engaging and immersive nocturnal experiences; those who have a mind inclined to detach themselves from external stimuli and follow spontaneous thoughts bring a more fragmented and discontinuous structure to their dreams.
Then there is the personal filter, the one that explains why two people, after a similar day, can wake up with completely different stories. The same event passes through memory, sensitivity, cognitive habits, quality of rest, fears, expectations. From there a very simple and very non-trivial thing arises: we also dream about the world, of course, but we dream about it with our internal voice.
The brain scrambles reality
To arrive at these results, the researchers used natural language analysis tools and language model-assisted assessments. In practice, the participants’ stories were read as texts: words, themes, connections, semantic fields, references to spaces, emotions, people, bodies, environments, limits, fear, visual images. The method combined two paths: one based on semantic dimensions defined at the start and a more exploratory one, built on the lexical domains that emerged from the stories.
The delicate step was to understand if a machine could really capture something as elusive as a dream told in the morning, perhaps with broken sentences and details still stuck to the pillow. For this reason, the automatic evaluations were compared with those of human evaluators and with an independent sample of participants asked to judge their dreams. Agreement was high on the 16 semantic dimensions considered, with levels comparable to those observed between independent human raters.
This part makes the study different from many previous works. For decades, dreams have often been collected and interpreted on small samples, with manual grids, more rigid categories, and retrospective questionnaires. Here the material is broader, more layered, collected day after day. Participants followed a diary protocol for two weeks, reporting experiences as soon as they woke up, so as to reduce memory distortions as much as possible. Alongside the stories, data on personality, cognitive functions, sleep and psychological characteristics were also collected.
The result resembles a map, with all the necessary precautions. Dreams remain subjective, private, often unstable experiences. But within this instability regularities appear. Certain themes return, certain emotional tones change, certain details move when daytime life changes. In short, the night works with recognizable materials.
Even the lockdown has changed dreams
The part about the 2020 lockdown gives the study even more concrete weight. There the outside world had changed for everyone, in the same period, with a rare force: closed houses, limited travel, fear of contagion, days all the same, loss of control. The researchers used a second independent dataset of 80 participants to observe the impact of that collective stress on dreams.
During the first lockdown, dreams showed more references to limitations and greater emotional intensity. As the years passed, those signs gradually faded. Normality, or something that resembled it, began to enter sleep again. This detail says a lot: dreams record individual pressures, but they also absorb the common atmosphere. A pandemic, a forced closure, a shared fear can change the nocturnal landscape of many people in the same period.
This doesn’t turn dreams into perfect psychological bulletins. No one can take a dream and use it as a soul report, with stamp and diagnosis. The research moves on aggregate data, on probabilities, on semantic structures. Yet that movement can be seen: when everything outside shrinks, something inside also changes shape. The rooms become narrower, the emotions denser, the images more charged.
Dreams, then, seem to function like a poorly ordered laboratory. The brain takes emotions, memories, recent stimuli, personal traits, quality of sleep and reenacts them while we are disconnected from the outside world. Sometimes he does it for almost banal images, sometimes with completely off-axis direction. The meaning comes later, if it comes. First there remains that physical sensation of waking up: the echo of something we experienced without moving from bed.
The answer to the question where dreams come from, therefore, is less romantic and more interesting. They come from the day, from character, from memories, from fears, from the body that sleeps, from the world that presses even when our eyes are closed. They come to us, with all the chaos of the case.
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