It’s hard to live your dreams — especially when you can’t remember them.

Remembering dreams, known as dream recall, is the capacity to recollect important details from a dream after waking up. Surprisingly, just 11% of Americans can consistently remember their dreams, leaving many puzzled about why some individuals find it easier to remember dreams than others.

Now, researchers in Italy say they have identified the individual characteristics and external factors that can influence the odds of waking up in the morning with impressions and memories from a dream experience.

“Our findings suggest that dream recall is not just a matter of chance but a reflection of how personal attitudes, cognitive traits and sleep dynamics interact,” said lead study author Giulio Bernardi, a professor in general psychology at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca.

What’s a dream?

A dream is a sequence of images, thoughts, emotions and sensations that our mind generates while we sleep. All of us dream every night.

Dreaming is believed to help us process our emotions, store memories, strengthen our brain’s neural connections, reduce stress, solve problems and think creatively.

Vivid dreams happen most often during the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stage, when the brain is particularly active.

Some people, especially women, said they were able to recall their dreams more often during the COVID-19 pandemic, which researchers attributed to greater stress, depression and sleep disruptions.

How did the study work?

The IMT research was conducted from 2020 to 2024.

Over 200 participants, between 18 and 70, took psychological tests and answered questionnaires before and after the trial to determine their anxiety levels, their interest in dreams and their tendency to get distracted.

They were given a voice recorder to report daily for 15 days if they dreamed or not and to describe the dream if they did.

Each participant also wore an actigraph, a device that detects sleep duration, quality and disturbances.

Which factors increase the chances of better dream recall?

The researchers proposed that the people most likely to recall dreams:

• Have a positive attitude about dreams
• Tend to let their minds wander
• Spend longer periods of time in light sleep
• Live in warmer weather — participants reported lower dream recall during winter
• Are younger — older people often have “white dreams,” the vague sense of having dreamed without concrete evidence

“These insights not only deepen our understanding of the mechanisms behind dreaming but also have implications for exploring dreams’ role in mental health and in the study of human consciousness,” Bernardi said.

What’s next?

The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Communications Psychology.

Valentina Elce, an IMT researcher and first study author, said data collected in this project will allow the team to research unusual changes in dream patterns and their possible significance for predicting or identifying medical or psychological conditions.