Science says a person's personality can affect the type of dreams they have

Imagine waking up from a strange dream set in a warped version of your office, only to dismiss it as random. In reality, these experiences aren’t as random as they seem. On the contrary, a study done by IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca, has revealed that your dreams might actually be linked to your personality. Published on April 28, it serves as a gateway to understanding yourself better.

How personalities influence dreams

The study published in Communications Psychology examined more than 3,700 reports of both dreams and waking experiences from 287 participants between the ages of 18 and 70. Over the course of two weeks, the participants kept daily records of their experiences, as the researchers tried to find out why some dreams feel vivid and lifelike while others are confusing and hard to remember, and what the connection is between such dreams and sleep habits, cognitive skills, personality traits, and psychological profiles. 

Initially, the researchers found that the brain isn't just replaying reality during sleep but rather reshaping those experiences. However, most interestingly, this study revealed that not everyone dreams in the same way. To put it simply, people who tend to mind-wander more often reported dreams that were fragmented and constantly changing. In contrast, those who place greater importance on dreams and believe they have meaning tend to experience richer and more immersive dream environments.

Even COVID changed dreams

The study also examined how large-scale events affect dreaming. Data collected during the COVID-19 lockdown by researchers at Sapienza University of Rome, and later compared with findings from the IMT team, showed that dreams during lockdown were more emotionally intense and frequently included themes of restriction and limitation. With time, these patterns gradually faded, indicating that dream content evolves around major life changes. 

Extroverts experience dreams more vividly 

This isn't the only study that successfully linked personalities to dreaming experience. Another study involved 370 subjects, out of whom 54% were male and 46% were female. The data was organized in nine themes, including trepidation, daze, contentment, dejection, flashbacks/past life events, symbolic, problem-solving/precognition dreams, reflective dreams, and creative dreams. In almost all of these categories, the frequency among extroverts was higher than that of introverts. Additionally, it also revealed that nearly 72% of extrovert dreams involved social scenarios, which wasn't the case with the introverts. 

Valentina Elce, researcher at the IMT School and lead author of the paper, described, "Our findings show that dreams are not just a reflection of past experiences, but a dynamic process shaped by who we are and what we live through. By combining large-scale data with computational methods, we were able to uncover patterns in dream content that were previously difficult to detect." 

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