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Dream incorporation of emotional and narrative movie features during sleep

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Jessica Palmieri¹ (), Tobias Debor¹, Susanne Fritz¹, Lea Velthuysen¹, Georgina Reichelt¹, Monika Schönauer¹; ¹University of Freiburg, Department of Psychology, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

It is still unclear to what extent dreaming activity and memory consolidation are intertwined and which aspects of an experience predominantly resurface in dreaming. As emotional memories are preferentially consolidated during sleep, emotionality might alter reprocessing dynamics and modulate dream incorporation. In this study, we biased participants’ dream content by experimentally manipulating their prior learning experience. 40 subjects underwent two experimental sessions, during which they watched and recalled movies before sleeping. They were then awakened repeatedly during the night and we collected their dream reports (N=202). Each participant was assigned to one emotional category (positive, neutral, negative), studying movies set either indoors or outdoors according to the experimental session. Three blind human raters were then asked to guess, based solely on the content of the anonymized dream reports, which emotional condition, spatial context, and specific movie-narratives each dream report was generated from. Dream reports were correctly assigned to the actual experimental condition above chance level based on the emotional as well as narrative features of collected dreams but not based on their spatial context. Moreover, dream incorporation scores based on emotional category as well as a combined measure of emotional and narrative features were significantly higher in the negative condition. Our findings show that both the emotionality and the narrative, but not the spatial context, of previously learned video material are incorporated into subsequent dreaming, particularly after an aversive encounter. Systematically manipulating pre-sleep learning experiences proves to be a promising approach to further investigate nocturnal cognitive processing dynamics.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic