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The American Dream: Election Night Dreams Predict Overnight Change in Feelings about the Election and the Future

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

William H. Livingston¹ (), Adam L. Putnam¹, Erin J. Wamsley¹; ¹Furman University Department of Psychology

Real-life experiences are often incorporated into our dreams. Does dreaming about those experiences affect how we feel about them? Prior studies suggest that dreaming may attenuate emotional reactivity overnight, with participants feeling less negative about an experience after dreaming about it. Here, we used the 2024 US presidential election to examine the relationship between dreaming and emotional reactivity in the context of a real-life emotional experience, hypothesizing that dreaming about the election would be associated with reduced negative feelings toward it the following morning. N = 931 American participants completed an online survey on the day of and the day after the 2024 US election. Participants rated their feelings about the election, their personal future, and the collective future of the country before and after election night and reported their dreams from that night. Of the 931 participants, 70% remembered a dream (N = 657) and half of all dreams were related to the election (N = 324). Contrary to our hypotheses, dreaming about the election was associated with intensified negative affect toward it next morning (F(1, 651) = 9.90, p = .002), as well as a more negative outlook toward both the personal future (F(1, 651) = 5.56 p = .019) and the collective future of the country (F(1, 651) = 7.35, p = .007). Contrary to emotional regulation theories of dreaming, these observations suggest that sleep and dreaming may amplify, rather than reduce emotional reactivity.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic