Synesthesia is associated with distinctive patterns in dream content

What is it about?

This study looked at whether people with synesthesia dream differently from people without it. We analysed 2,337 dream reports — half written by people who self-identify as having synesthesia and half by matched controls. Synesthesia is a trait where certain kinds of information automatically trigger extra sensations, such as seeing colours when reading letters or tasting flavours when hearing words. Synesthetes also tend to score higher on imagination, creativity, and openness. We tested whether these enduring traits show up in dream content. Four themes appeared more often in synesthetes’ dreams: everyday digital activity, situations involving guilt or repair, scenes of conflict or pursuit, and dream worlds that shifted across varied or unusual settings. The results show that dream content reflects consistent differences in how groups of people think and experience their lives.

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Photo by Cole Marshall on Unsplash

Photo by Cole Marshall on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Dreams are usually studied at the individual level. This work shows that large-scale dream data can detect stable group differences in how people process the world. It offers evidence that dream content is not random noise but carries reliable information about how different populations think, feel, and make sense of experience. The study also demonstrates that computational methods can uncover subtle psychological patterns at scale. This opens the door to using dream data as a new resource for understanding individual differences, imagination, and lived experience in a way that traditional surveys or lab tasks often cannot.

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