Träume und Tagträume teilen unerwartete Muster der Bizarrheit. Eine neue Studie zeigt, dass das Umherschweifen im Wachzustand genauso reich an bizarren Elementen ist wie das Träumen, auch wenn die Art der Seltsamkeit unterschiedlich ist.

Dreams and daydreams share unexpected patterns of bizarreness

People often assume that nighttime dreams are much stranger than the thoughts that drift through our minds during the day. A new study published in Consciousness and Cognition shows that waking mind wandering is just as densely packed with bizarre elements as dreaming, though the nature of the weirdness differs. The findings suggest that both states share a similar foundation of spontaneous offline simulation, challenging old ideas about the strict boundaries between sleep and waking consciousness.

When looking at the reports as whole stories, dreams did appear weirder. About half of the dream reports contained numerous strange elements, compared to only a third of the mind wandering reports. This surface-level analysis confirmed the traditional idea that sleep produces wilder thoughts than wakefulness.

Zooming in on the density of the individual elements revealed an entirely different pattern. The researchers found that roughly eight percent of all dream elements were bizarre, compared to nine percent of the elements in mind wandering episodes. Waking mind wandering and nighttime dreaming contained nearly the exact same concentration of strange features. The two states just express that strangeness in different ways.

Beyond the unusual features, the researchers noticed that actions dominated the content of both states. Rather than just seeing passive images, people actively simulated themselves doing things. Additionally, social interactions and other characters made up about a fifth to a quarter of the content in both types of reports, showing that we simulate social worlds whether we are awake or asleep.

In dreams, incongruity and vagueness are incredibly widespread across all categories of thought. Dreamers frequently report contextual mismatches, like finding a childhood bedroom tucked inside a modern office building. Dreams also feature very specific subtypes of bizarreness that never appeared in the daytime mind wandering reports. These unique dream features included fused identities, where a single character possesses the combined physical or personality traits of two completely different people.

Dreams also exclusively featured ongoing transformations. In a sleep state, a friend might slowly morph into a coworker, or a moving train might smoothly shift into a car. These slow, blended mutations give dreams a highly combinatorial narrative structure. The resting brain slowly stitches different memory fragments together to maintain an ongoing, if somewhat illogical, storyline.

Waking mind wandering is highly fragmented by comparison. The researchers found that discontinuity was twice as frequent in daytime thoughts as it was in sleep. When the waking mind wanders, it jumps abruptly from one topic or location to the next. Objects and people do not slowly transform. Instead, they simply vanish and are replaced by completely new, disconnected thoughts. Waking spontaneous thought behaves more like rapidly changing television channels than a blended movie.

The researchers observed that strange elements in daytime thoughts were mostly concentrated around changes to the self. A person might imagine themselves in a different career or looking slightly older. Dreams featured these same alterations but pushed them to impossible extremes. A dreamer might inhabit a completely different body or become a fictional cartoon character in their sleep.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810025001588