People who remember their dreams are highly creative, and their brains work a little differently than others.
This conclusion was reached by researchers from the University of California (Berkeley, USA), whose article In the magazine Nature and Science of Sleep.
Scientists tried to find an answer to the question: why do some people constantly remember their dreams, while other people almost never can remember what they dreamed about last night? For this, an experiment was conducted with the participation of 55 healthy volunteers aged 19 to 29 years. About half of them generally remembered their dreams well (on average, participants in this group could remember about six dreams per week), and the rest were poor (could remember less than one dream per week, on average).
All participants were tested for personal qualities, anxiety levels, sleep quality, as well as for different types of memory and creative abilities. Then, using magnetic resonance imaging, the scientists studied the pattern of brain activity of the participants in the state of sleep and wakefulness.
The researchers found that there were no significant differences between participants in both groups in personality traits, anxiety levels, sleep quality, and memory performance.
However, participants who were good at remembering dreams scored much higher on tests of creativity..
In addition, these people turned out to have significantly more functional neural connections in the network of the passive mode of the brain. This network turns on when we dream, fantasize, go deep into our thoughts, and its activity contributes to the emergence of creative ideas.
True, researchers do not yet know where the cause is and where the effect is — whether the innate features of the brain work lead to good dream memorization and high creativity, or vice versa, the innate ability to remember dreams leads to an increase in creativity and ultimately changes brain function.