People often think that dreams at night are much stranger than the thoughts that float through your head during the day. New research published in consciousness and cognition This study shows that the wanderings of our waking minds are chock-full of strange elements, just like dreams, but the nature of the strangeness is different. This finding suggests that both states share similar underpinnings of spontaneous offline simulation, challenging old ideas about a strict boundary between sleep and wakeful consciousness.
Spontaneous thinking is a large part of our inner mental life. When our attention is removed from the task at hand, our minds are free to wander through memories, fantasies, and hypothetical scenarios. Nighttime dreams work in much the same way, unfolding without our direct intentional control. Psychologists and neuroscientists have long debated whether dreams and waking mind wandering exist on a fluid spectrum or represent entirely different categories of experience.
A central point of discussion is the concept of strangeness. Dream freaks refer to unusual, improbable, or physically impossible events that occur while we are asleep. Common examples include encountering a deceased relative, noticing a familiar room in the wrong city, or suddenly gaining the ability to fly. Some researchers consider these strange occurrences to be evidence that dreams are fundamentally disconnected from waking life. Some argue that dreams are essentially just a more intense version of your waking mind’s wanderings.
One influential psychological theory suggests that both conditions depend on how much control we have over our minds. When we are concentrating on a task, our thinking is severely restricted. As your mind wanders during the day, your intentional constraints loosen and your thoughts drift. During sleep, these constraints are thought to be further weakened, resulting in unguided transitions. If this framework were true, the researchers predicted that dreams would be characterized by far more discontinuity and strangeness than daytime thoughts.
To test these ideas, Manuela Kilberg and Jennifer Wint, philosophers and consciousness researchers at Australia’s Monash University, designed a new study. Past studies have often relied on simple questionnaires that ask participants to rate the strangeness of the entire experience on a single scale. Carberg and Wint wanted to take a closer look at the specific types of unusual elements present in both states to see exactly how the boundaries of reality bend when the mind goes off script.
The researchers used a method called self-catch design to capture nature experiences that occur in everyday life. Twenty-one participants recorded one daytime mind-wandering episode and one nighttime dream every day for several weeks. Participants used a smartphone app to record audio descriptions of their thoughts and dreams immediately after waking up or realizing their attention had wandered.
This approach generated 379 individual audio reports. Rather than relying on participants’ self-assessments, the study was able to measure abnormal mental content more objectively by having external reviewers evaluate the recordings. The judges broke down each report into distinct elements, such as specific people, places, actions, and objects. They then categorized all strangeness into three main types of strangeness: incongruity, ambiguity, and discontinuity.
Discrepancies occur when the elements don’t match, or are simply impossible, such as a dog breathing fire. Ambiguity occurs when a place or identity is not fully defined. Discontinuity refers to a sudden jump in time or space, where a person appears to pop out of nowhere. The researchers also measured the density of these anomalous traits by calculating the proportion of strange elements compared to normal elements in the report.
The dream seemed even stranger when looking at the entire report as a story. About half of the dream reports contained many strange elements, whereas only a third of the reports of mind wanderings. This surface-level analysis confirmed the conventional idea that sleep produces more rambunctious thinking than wakefulness.
Zooming in on the density of individual elements revealed a completely different pattern. Researchers have found that about 8 percent of all dream elements are strange. In contrast, 9 percent of the elements in mind-wandering episodes are bizarre. My waking mind wanderings and my night dreams contained about the same concentration of strange features. The two states just express their strangeness in different ways.
The researchers found that, beyond anomalous features, actions dominated the content of both states. People actively simulated themselves doing something rather than just passively looking at an image. Furthermore, social interactions and other characters account for approximately one-fifth to one-fourth of the content in both types of reports, indicating that we simulate the social world whether we are awake or asleep.
In dreams, discomfort and ambiguity are incredibly pervasive across all categories of thought. Dreamers frequently report inconsistencies in context, such as finding their childhood bedroom inside a modern office building. Dreams are also characterized by a very specific subtype of strangeness that never appeared in reports of daytime mind wanderings. These unique dream features included fused identities, where a single character combined the physical or personality traits of two completely different people.
Dreams also had exclusive coverage of the ongoing transformation. In a sleep state, a friend may slowly turn into a colleague, or a moving train may smoothly turn into a car. These slowly mixed mutations give dreams a highly combinatorial narrative structure. When your brain is at rest, it slowly piece together different memory fragments to maintain an ongoing, if somewhat illogical, story.
In comparison, the wandering state of the waking mind is highly fragmented. The researchers found that thoughts during the day were interrupted twice as often as thoughts during sleep. The waking mind wanders, jumping suddenly from one topic or place to the next. Things and people do not change slowly. Instead, they simply disappear and are replaced by entirely new, disconnected thoughts. Spontaneous thoughts upon awakening are more like rapidly changing television channels than a blended movie.
The researchers observed that the strange elements in daytime thinking were primarily centered around changes to the self. People may imagine themselves in a different career or looking a little older. I saw these same changes in my dreams, but pushed them to impossible extremes. A dreamer may inhabit a completely different body or become a fictional cartoon character while sleeping.
Although this study examines the nature of spontaneous thought in great detail, this methodology has certain limitations. The sample size of individual participants was relatively small, even though they collectively submitted several hundred reports. The researchers also pointed out that the participants were recording their experiences at home, meaning there was no brain activity data to confirm exactly which sleep stages produced dreams.
Participants also submitted longer descriptions and a greater amount of nighttime dreams than daytime wandering episodes. This study may capture a specific subset of very vivid dream logic, as people typically remember early morning dreams just before waking, and those later dreams are known to be particularly rare.
Recognizing exactly how these two states of consciousness diverge and overlap can help scientists better understand how the human brain pulls apart and recombines memories to simulate reality. Future research could investigate how an individual’s age changes the frequency and strangeness of unguided thoughts. The relationship between age and qualitative aspects of spontaneous thinking is still not well understood and provides fertile ground for future research.
Ultimately, the results of this study show that analyzing mental strangeness is like spinning a kaleidoscope. Depending on the exact angle and scale of measurement, completely different patterns of similarities and differences emerge. Night dreams cannot simply be ignored because they are inherently stranger than daytime daydreams. Fully grasping the limits of human imagination requires a nuanced approach.
The study, “Kaleidoscope of Weirdness: Analysis of First-Person Reports Shows the Relationship Between Dreams and Mind Wandering is Complex,” was authored by Manuela Kilberg and Jennifer Wint.
