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Dreaming of a Better Past: The Role of Dreaming in Modifying Highly Emotional Autobiographical Memories

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Henderson S. Holder¹ (), Erin Wamsley¹; ¹Furman University Sleep Lab

Dreaming has been hypothesized to serve a functional role in memory formation and emotional regulation. Dream content often reflects waking concerns and emotional experiences, but the mechanisms underlying this process remain unknown. Here, we investigated how reactivating highly emotional autobiographical memories prior to sleep affects dream content and subsequent emotional appraisals of these memories. Participants (N = 43) completed the Autobiographical Emotional Memory Task (AEMT) prior to bed for three consecutive nights, and were awoken up to two times each night to provide verbal dream reports, with a final report upon awakening for the day. We hypothesized that reactivating negative emotional memories would lead to greater incorporation of memory elements in dream content relative to recalling positive memories, and that dreaming about these memories would reduce emotional reactivity towards them. Statistical analysis of the data collected in this study is ongoing. If our hypotheses are supported, this would provide further evidence that dream content can be experimentally manipulated by reactivating emotional memories prior to sleep, and would highlight an emotional regulatory function of dreaming, whereby incorporation of memory elements into dreams results in less intense subjective emotional appraisals of the memory post-sleep.

Topic Area: OTHER