COVID-19 has critically impacted the world. Recent works have found substantial changes in sleep and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dreams could give us crucial information about people's well-being, so here we have directly investigated the consequences of lockdown on the oneiric activity in a large Italian sample: 5,988 adults completed a web-survey during lockdown.
Once questioned the assumption that dreaming depends on REM sleep, subsequent studies focused on the neural correlates of dream recall (DR). Considering the indirect access to the sleep mentation, this chapter reviews the main neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and electrophysiological findings on DR. Compelling evidence supports the idea that shared mechanisms between sleep and wakefulness underline the encoding and retrieval of episodic memory, studying DR as amnestic trace. On the other side, several observations suggest that higher cortical activation is crucial to dreaming.
Brain and sleep maturation covary across different stages of life. At the same time, dream generation and dream recall are intrinsically dependent on the development of neural systems. The aim of this paper is to review the existing studies about dreaming in infancy, adulthood, and the elderly stage of life, assessing whether dream mentation may reflect changes of the underlying cerebral activity and cognitive processes.
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