We’ve all started the day with a strange mood that’s hard to explain. A feeling of heaviness, latent anxiety, or sometimes an inexplicable joy. Often, you just need to think about it for a moment to find the source: a dream. But are these impressions simply anecdotal, or do they reflect a real psychological phenomenon?
This is precisely the question that Garrett Baber, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas, wanted to explore in a study published in the journal SLEEP.
A hypothesis: dreams as an emotional training ground
For several years, neuroscientists have been putting forward an intriguing idea: dreams, including the most frightening ones, could play an adaptive role. According to this hypothesis, experiencing fear during sleep would function as a form of exposure therapy, allowing one to better manage one’s emotions while awake.
“In our dreams we are in a safe environment”explains Garrett Baber. “If the situation becomes too intense, we wake up. As long as it doesn’t turn into a nightmare, this fear could help us better regulate our emotions afterwards.”
The objective of the study was therefore clear: to test whether the emotions experienced in dreams really influence our emotional state the next day.
To answer this question, researchers analyzed the dream reports of more than 500 participants. Using machine learning, they were able to identify and classify the emotions present in these dreams, mainly fear and joy, and then compare them to the participants’ mood the next morning.
Results… contradictory
However, the study’s conclusions are far from being as clear as previously thought.
On the one hand, the results show that in the short term, the more fear a dream contains, the more negative the mood the next morning tends to be.
But at the individual level, people who use effective emotional regulation strategies (such as acceptance rather than suppression) report more fear in their dreams.
In other words, a contradiction appears:
- Dream fear seems to weigh on the immediate mood;
- But it is also associated, in certain people, with better overall emotional management.
One of the most surprising results concerns the coexistence of several emotions in the same dream. When dreams mixed fear and joy, participants were less likely to wake up with a negative mood.
This “emotional complexity” could therefore have a protective effect, suggesting that the brain does not just simulate emotions, but actively works on them.
The psychoanalytic gaze: the persistence of affect
Why these effects? For the psychoanalyst Paolo Furgiuele, the essential thing is not only the dream itself, but what it leaves behind.
“Dreams are not simple nocturnal images. What acts on us is the resonance they produce during the day.”
According to him, dreams influence our emotions in three main ways:
- They reveal latent affects: a worry or a repressed desire can emerge without apparent cause upon waking.
- They do not have a universal meaning: a dream only has meaning for the person who has it.
- They intensify emotions that are already present: the night acts as an amplifier.
A dream that persists during the day is thus a sign of a psychic movement in progress.
A Lacanian reading of dreams
In Jacques Lacan’s perspective, the dream is part of a chain of signifiers. It touches the subject at the heart of its desire and its lack.
“Certain dream images function as fixation points, producing a lasting resonance effect. This repetition translates what psychoanalysis calls the return of the repressed: what has not been symbolized returns, again and again, in the form of a dream… and emotion“. And remains a still vast field of experimentation and interpretation.
Between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, one idea converges: dreams do not disappear upon waking. They continue to act, silently, on our emotional state.
As our psychoanalyst summarizes well: the dream ends, the affect continues its work.