The New Science of Dreaming
TIME spotlights recent dream research, including Robert Stickgold's finding that people who dream about a task they just practiced perform better on it afterward, even without remembering the dream. It also covers new lucid dreaming techniques that let researchers communicate with dreamers in real time using eye movements and facial signals (TIME, 2026).
Social media reveals population dynamics of dysphoric dreaming
Researchers analyzed dream posts on Reddit's r/Dreams community from 2019–2020, comparing content before and after the WHO's COVID-19 pandemic declaration. Nightmares and dream-related anxiety rose sharply after the declaration, suggesting social media could offer a real-time way to track population sleep health (Sleep Epidemiology, 2026).
Dasdaq: Reimagining Dreams as Creative Assets in Human–AI Systems
Dreams are usually treated as private material, useful mainly for therapy or personal reflection. This project asks whether they could also work as shared creative material, drawing on a Korean folk practice of exchanging auspicious dreams. Dasdaq pairs a bedside lamp that records dreams as soon as a person wakes with an AI system that reconstructs them into stories and images, then makes those fragments tradable on a market-style interface where other people can browse and draw on them for their own creative work (CHI Extended Abstracts, 2026).
Dream Relay: Exploring Dream Sharing with Generative AI
Participants recorded their dreams using a dream probe, then had generative AI turn those dreams into images and passed them to the next participant as a prompt for their own dream. The relay format, combined with AI-generated visuals, made people more comfortable sharing personal dream content, since the images added some distance from the dream itself and eased privacy concerns. The researchers see this as a role for AI in making dream sharing more social and collaborative (CHI Extended Abstracts, 2025)
The Value of Shared Dreams
Can dreaming really help solve waking problems? And could a specific form of dream analysis help an organisation better achieve shared goals and objectives? In this INSEAD Knowledge podcast, Susan Long, Emeritus Professor at the National Institute of Organization Dynamics Australia and Michael Jarrett, Professor of Management at INSEAD offer their perspective on the value of social dreaming for firms (INSEAD Knowledge, 2025).
The Island’s Collective Dream
Dreams from people living on the Isle of Sheppey are weaved together, using AI, human curation, and imagery to highlight shared motifs like carnivals, dogs, mazes, climbing, and steam. The work creates a communal dream-sequence that blends individual fragments into something collective—surfacing the emotional highs and anxieties of that community (Adam Chodzko, 2025).
cosmologyscape
Cosmologyscape is an invitation to the public to dream. Created by artists Kite and Alisha B Wormsley, and selected in Creative Time’s 2022 Open Call, the multimedia and participatory public art project unfolds across multiple sites, digital and in public space (Creative Time, 2024).
Within the space of a dream
The exhibition "Le temps d’un rêve / In the space of a dream" at the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, France, is a comprehensive exploration of dreaming, covering its science, cultural representations, and artistic endeavors (Musée des Confluences, 2024).
Anxiety Dominated our Dreams in 2024 with a Spike During US Election
Dream data from over 13,000 reports in 2024 revealed that more than 70% carried anxious or fearful emotions, with a striking spike around the U.S. election. Yet as the year went on, these anxiety-laden dreams gave way to themes of growth, resilience, and transformation, showing how collective stress can shift into adaptation (Dream Decoder, 2024).
Psychosocial and Cultural Perspectives on the War in Ukraine. Imprints and Dreamscapes
Following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, students were invited to keep diaries and dream journals to capture what they saw, heard, and felt. The resulting book layers these personal records with artistic materials and scholarly essays on fear, rupture, and resistance, offering rare insight into the everyday and emotional dimensions of war (Routledge, 2024).
The LEGO Group Reveals How Children Can “Dream Craft” Their Way to Amazing Adventures
In the lead-up to the final 10 episodes of LEGO® DREAMZzz™ Night of the Never Witch, a new study reveals that children can learn how to guide and change their dreams, similar to the characters in the series (Lego, 2024).
Taking the Bizarre Seriously: Dreams as a Material for Interaction Design
Most sleep technology focuses on optimizing sleep — tracking cycles, adjusting the bedroom environment — rather than what happens inside a dream. This project takes the opposite approach, treating dreams as design material. Researchers built the dream sticker machine, a device that turns a written dream into an AI-generated image, creating a physical object people can display, share, or reflect on; they then used it as a research probe to see how people imagine their dreams taking form in the real world (Designing Interactive Systems, 2024).
The stuff that nightmares are made of: Israeli dreams in times of the Israel-Hamas war
This qualitative study of 242 dreams collected after the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023, shows how national trauma and heightened mortality salience were mirrored in dream content.
2020 Dreams. Toward a New Understanding of the Dreaming-Waking Continuum
The year 2020 emerged as a pivotal moment in modern history, in many overlapping and mutually reinforced ways. This interactive digital project illuminates the dramatic and epochal events of that year as witnessed from the vantage of collective dreaming (Stanford University Press, 2023).
Climate Change Dreams
A growing number of people are dreaming explicitly about climate change, reflecting both collective anxiety and emerging hope about environmental collapse. Surveys and dream reports show generational and demographic differences—young people, men, and people of color dream about climate change most often (Time, 2023).
Dreams are a precious resource. Don’t let advertisers hack them.
New marketing techniques are emerging that use targeted stimuli before or during sleep to influence what we dream—and what we want when we wake. While these dream-engineering tools hold promise for healing, creativity, and personal growth, advertisers are eager to exploit them for commercial gain, raising serious ethical concerns about privacy and consent (Aeon, 2021)