AI sneaks into our dreams: thousands of dreams reveal secrets of the human mind
AI dream interpretation: Italian study from IMT School on 287 people reveals that dreams are not random
Many people believe that dreams are just random, illogical scenes with no meaning, but a research team in Italy used artificial intelligence technologies to turn this idea upside down.
What a person sees during sleep is not chaotic as believed, but follows precise patterns and is linked to their personality, daily experiences, and even major events happening in the world.
Italian study from IMT School on 287 people
A research team from the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy, conducted a scientific study involving 287 volunteers aged between 18 and 70 years, and this study lasted for two full weeks.
The researchers analyzed more than 3,700 dreams and wakeful experience reports, as participants daily recorded their dreams and details of their daily lives with precision.
The team also collected comprehensive information about sleep patterns, cognitive abilities, personality traits, and psychological characteristics of each study participant.
How did researchers use artificial intelligence to analyze dreams?
The researchers used advanced natural language processing techniques, a branch of artificial intelligence specialized in analyzing texts and understanding their meanings, to analyze the semantic content of dreams in a measurable, quantifiable way.
These innovative techniques enabled the research team to study sixteen different dimensions of dreams, such as emotions, places, social interaction, and the degree of control a person has over dream events, with objectivity and precision not possible with traditional methods like old dream interpretations or personal interviews.
Dreams are not random but a complex map of internal and external factors
The study results showed that dream content is not random or chaotic as some imagine, but reflects a complex interaction between internal factors related to the person themselves and external factors related to the world around them.
On one hand, a person’s personality traits such as their tendency toward mind-wandering or distraction, their sleep patterns and depth, and their interest in dreams and beliefs about their importance, play a fundamental role in shaping what they see during sleep.
On the other hand, major world events leave their clear mark on dreams, such as wars, economic crises, or the COVID-19 pandemic that deeply affected the mood of people around the world.
How does the mind rebuild reality during sleep?
The researchers found that the human mind does not merely replay daily events as they are during sleep, but rather performs an active and complex process of reconstruction and composition.
A familiar place like one’s office, classroom, or a hospital room they visited does not appear in a dream in its original version matching reality. Instead, the mind changes it and merges it with different scenes and places, creating entirely new scenarios that may seem unrealistic or surreal.
This means that dreams do not reflect reality as a rigid mirror, but actively reshape it and merge fragments of past experiences with the person’s imagination and future expectations.
What do your dreams say about your personality and sleep patterns?
Researcher Valentina Elce, from IMT School and lead author of the study published in Communications Psychology, part of the prestigious Nature scientific group, explains that dreams are not just a mirror reflecting the past as previously believed, but are a dynamic process that forms and changes according to each person’s identity and daily lifestyle.
The results revealed that people more prone to mind-wandering, meaning those whose thoughts tend to wander and move quickly between different topics during wakefulness, tend to see fragmented, incoherent, and constantly changing dreams.
In contrast, people who have a strong belief in the importance of dreams and their deep meaning tend to see dreams richer in details and higher in vividness and clarity compared to others.
The study also showed that the quality and depth of a person’s sleep directly affect the content and different patterns of their dreams.
The COVID-19 pandemic proves that global crises sneak into our dreams
Major global events have not been absent from the dream world, as the study proved when comparing its results with previous data collected by researchers from Sapienza University in Rome during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
The IMT team analyzed the dreams of 80 participants during the first lockdown period in Italy in the spring of 2020. They found that dreams during that exceptional period were more emotionally intense and stronger in feelings, with recurring themes of restrictions, boundaries, confinement, and fear of illness, clearly reflecting the influence of the prevailing social and health context at that time.
Over time, as people gradually adapted to the new situation imposed by the pandemic, these effects and heavy themes gradually faded from the participants’ dreams.
This indicates that dream content is not static, but evolves and changes in parallel with a person’s ability to psychologically adapt to major and difficult events in their life.
Researcher Valentina Elce commented on this result, saying that her team was able to uncover patterns in dream content that were previously difficult to detect, by combining large-scale collected data with advanced computational methods provided by artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence outperforms humans in dream analysis
One of the most important findings of this study was the revolutionary role that artificial intelligence can play in understanding dreams in the future.
Natural language processing models have proven their ability to capture the meaning and structure of dreams with accuracy comparable to, and in some cases surpassing, that of independent human expert evaluators who analyze dreams.
This technological advancement means that artificial intelligence can now analyze thousands of dreams in record time, with speed and accuracy sometimes exceeding the ability of human experts who have spent years studying this field.
New horizons for studying consciousness and mental health using artificial intelligence
This great superiority in AI’s ability to analyze dreams opens the door to broader use of these technologies in studying the secrets of human consciousness, memory, and mental health.
It also provides an opportunity for researchers to develop new and innovative tools to help psychiatrists and therapists understand what goes on in their patients’ inner worlds during sleep with greater accuracy, consistency, and objectivity, away from subjective interpretations or unreliable traditional interpretations.
Researchers believe that this new scientific approach could bring about a real revolution in the way we study the human mind and psychological disorders related to sleep and dream disorders.
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The hidden messages of dreams: Not meaningless, a British study reveals their details
