A 2008 review paper showed that across several studies, when participants sleep in the laboratory, about a third of the time, they dream about the laboratory. The author (Schredl, 2008) suggested this is a fundamental problem in dream science because the measurement technique, polysomnography sleep recording, is clearly affecting the object of measurement: dreaming. In other words, we are altering dream content by observing it in the lab. This alteration leads to questions about whether dreams collected in the laboratory are as ecologically valid as dreams collected at home; there are certain questions that can be reliably answered via laboratory experiments, whereas other types of experiments would be better suited to home study.
One potential problem is that participants seem to have an increased incidence of dreams in which they dream about being in the sleep lab and are awake and struggling to sleep. Participants can even report confusion on awakening over whether something in their dream had really happened or not (e.g., speaking with an experimenter about not sleeping well).
In cases like these, participants may feel like they’re not dreaming and just lying awake in bed when they’re dreaming about not being able to sleep. This phenomenon has recently received clinical study concerning insomnia–a subtype of “paradoxical insomnia,” which includes the frequent experience of feeling awake during the night, despite objectively being asleep.
In a previous post, I wrote about how the subjective feeling of being awake is associated with more restless sleep and is indeed a sleep disorder. This restless sleep might be the culprit of certain morning disagreements between bed partners, in which one partner claims they didn’t get any sleep the prior night, and the other partner proclaims, “I heard you snoring all night long!”
While these are fascinating experiences to study, the question remains of whether these are “typical” dreams or whether these types of “feeling awake while asleep” experiences are triggered by being in the laboratory and having a more restless sleep.
On the other hand, several of the themes identified in dreams reported in the laboratory seem to reflect “typical” dreams that are also frequently reported at home. For instance, participants often incorporated the experimenters and other personnel into dreams, similar to typical dreams, in which we generally know that dreams have a high prevalence of social situations. This social nature of dreaming potentially serves a function in strengthening social bonds.
In addition, lab dreams often incorporated tasks that participants had to complete in the lab, not only sleeping well and remembering dreams but also as part of a memory performance test before and after sleep. These tasks are typical sleep and dream research protocols: have participants perform a task before sleep, then let them sleep and collect dream reports, and perform the task again following sleep.
In laboratory experiments, it’s been shown that dreaming of a learning task can be associated with better memory performance following sleep. Even dreaming of the laboratory more generally can be related to memory.
Finally, false awakenings and dreams in which we anticipate what we will do the next day occur in the laboratory and at home. They may reflect a general function of dreaming in preparing for action and, more generally, maintaining some awareness of the current environment so that we are ready to enter the waking world. That these dreams seem to be more frequent in the laboratory may reflect a heightened level of vigilance or arousal that we experience while sleeping under observation.
Overall, knowing that the lab gets incorporated into dreams can be used to its advantage in dream research—for instance, using the frequent false awakening lab dreams as a cue to trigger lucid dreaming. That said, it is important to continue complementing laboratory studies with more extensive home-based survey studies to better understand how dreaming varies in different environments and under different conditions. With the advent of more mobile sleep recording technology, it might be possible to have the best of both worlds: objective sleep recordings in the home setting, with dream reports collected over longer periods.
