Swimming into your dreams (Image: Altarribalbajar/Plainpicture)

You open your front door to find your boss – who is also a cat. The bizarre can seem completely normal when you’re dreaming, perhaps because parts of your brain give up trying to figure out what’s going on.

Armando D’Agostino of the University of Milan in Italy thinks that the strangeness of dreams resembles psychosis, because individuals are disconnected from reality and have disrupted thought processes that lead to wrong conclusions.

Hoping to learn more about psychotic thoughts, D’Agostino and his colleagues investigated how our brains respond to the bizarre elements of dreams.


Because it is all but impossible to work out what a person is dreaming about while they’re asleep, D’Agostino’s team asked 12 people to keep diaries in which they were to write detailed accounts of seven dreams. When volunteers could remember one, they were also told to record what they had done that day and come up with an unrelated fantasy story to accompany an image they had been given.

Using a “bizarreness” scoring system, the researchers found that dreams were significantly weirder than the waking fantasies the volunteers composed. “It seems counterintuitive, but there was almost no bizarreness in fantasies,” says D’Agostino. “There are logical constraints on waking fantasies and they are never as bizarre as a dream.”

Powering down

A month later, the reports were read back to each of the dreamers while their brain activity was monitored with an fMRI scanner. Both dreams and fantasies seemed to selectively activate a set of structures in the right hemisphere of the brain associated with complex language processing, such as understanding multiple meanings of a word.

Curiously, the activity in this area appeared to decrease as the narrative became increasingly bizarre. It is almost as if the brain is giving up trying to make sense of the dream, says D’Agostino.

“It’s a legitimate theory,” says Patrick McNamara at Boston University. He thinks that dreams may act as symbols in a process that consolidates and stores memories. Bizarreness may be the result of the brain’s attempt to symbolise complex emotions. “When emotions are intense, they are harder to symbolise, so perhaps the dreams are more likely to be bizarre,” he says.

But Bill Domhoff at the University of California in Santa Cruz is opposed to the idea of comparing dreams to psychosis, partly because not all dreams are bizarre. “Dreaming is not hallucinatory and psychotic,” he says. “It is an intensified form of mind-wandering.”

Journal reference: Journal of Sleep Research, DOI: 10.1111/jsr.12299