Science Reveals How Personality Shapes Bizarre Dreams During Stressful Times

How Personality Traits Shape Our Dreams

Why do we dream? For millennia, this question has puzzled humanity. Now, a groundbreaking study published in Communications Psychology offers fresh insights by linking personality traits to the content of our dreams. Researchers analyzed more than 3,700 dream reports from 207 participants collected between 2020 and 2024, alongside 80 additional reports from the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic (April–May 2020).

Key Findings: Personality and Dream Bizarreness

The study, led by Valentina Elce of the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, found that individuals with a tendency to mind-wander during waking hours experienced more bizarre dreams. The research team explained:

“Our findings indicate that dream bizarreness is associated with a higher tendency of the individuals to mind-wander, which also drives frequent shifts in narrative settings. This is in line with accounts suggesting that dreaming and mind-wandering may share a common neural and cognitive foundation.”

Dream Content During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The pandemic provided a unique lens to study how external events shape dream experiences. A subset of 80 participants—60 women and 20 men—recorded their dreams during the initial lockdown phase in spring 2020. The researchers observed:

• Increased references to limitations (e.g., being trapped or confined);
• Heightened emotional intensity in dream narratives;
• A gradual normalization of these effects over the following years as pandemic restrictions eased.

“During lockdown, dreams showed increased references to limitations and heightened emotional intensity, effects that gradually normalized over the following years,” said Elce and her team.

Study Methodology: How Researchers Analyzed Dreams

The study involved 207 Italian adults aged 18 to 70, who were assessed for psychological traits, cognitive abilities, demographics, and sleep patterns. Participants recorded their dreams immediately upon waking, using a structured scale to describe elements such as:

• Bizarreness (how unusual or illogical the dream felt);
• Vividness (clarity and sensory detail);
• Valence (emotional tone, positive or negative);
• Agency (the dreamer’s sense of control over events).

Participants also logged their waking experiences daily. Using natural language processing models, the team quantitatively analyzed the semantic structure of dream reports and identified correlations between individual traits and dream content.

Broader Implications: Dreams as a Reflection of Waking Life

The research underscores that dreams are not isolated phenomena but are influenced by both stable personality traits and transient external events. Elce and colleagues concluded:

“These findings demonstrate that stable individual traits and incidental experiences jointly shape dream semantics.”

More on Dreams and Science

For further reading on dream science and related topics, explore the following:

• Book: First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens by the author of this study;
• Newsletter: Subscribe to the BeX Files for updates on space, science, and the unknown.