Motivation and emotion/Book/2026/Dreams and emotional problem-solving

Dreams and emotional problem-solving:
How do REM dreams contribute to emotional processing and adaptive coping?

Overview

Case study: part 1

Natalie hasn't slept well in weeks. It's not like she's waking up screaming from a nightmare or anything that dramatic. But the same dream keeps coming back: she has been left behind somewhere, calling out to someone who doesn't turn around. Her friends say it's just stress from the breakup. By lunchtime she can barely remember the details, but the feeling hangs around all day. She's isn't short on sleep, so why does she keep waking up feeling like she's already lost something? Is the dream working through her breakup, or just replaying it? [Consider highlighting how the dream facilitates emotional processing and/or coping]

A dream is a conscious experience during sleep that can be recalled on waking, and dreams reported after rapid eye movement (REM) sleep tend to be the most vivid and the most emotional (Scarpelli et al., 2022).
Two processes are involved here, and it helps to keep them apart. Emotional processing happens overnight, when an emotional memory loses some of its intensity. Coping happens while a person is awake, through the strategies a person uses to manage stress (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004). The subtitle asks whether the first supports the second.
Sleep is widely described as overnight therapy: it holds onto the emotional memory but strips some of its sting by morning (Walker & van der Helm, 2009).
Very few researchers dispute that sleep does something, what they dispute is the role of the dream. Either the dream is where the emotional work happens, or it is a window into work that sleep would be doing anyway (Scarpelli, 2026).
Why does settling this matter? Because recurring distressing dreams like Natalie's (see Figure 1) are common, they appear across psychiatric disorders involving emotion dysregulation, and they can be treated (Casement & Swanson, 2012; Mendoza Alvarez et al., 2024).

Focus questions

Does emotional processing during sleep depend on dreaming? [Use open-ended focus questions]
What might a dream be doing with emotion?
What does dream emotion predict for waking coping?
How can dreams be targeted to improve coping?

Dreaming and emotional processing during sleep

Focus question: Does emotional processing during sleep depend on dreaming?

Natalie's dream keeps coming back with its emotional charge intact, which is what REM sleep is supposed to prevent. Explaining why means separating two things that are easily confused: what REM sleep does to an emotional memory, and what the dream does. Most evidence addresses REM sleep, so this section covers that briefly and then asks what is known about dreaming itself.

What sleep does

The leading model is Walker and van der Helm's (2009) "sleep to forget, sleep to remember" [APA style requires page numbers for direct quotes]. During REM sleep, the brain replays emotional memories while noradrenaline (the chemical behind the body's stress response) is switched off, so the memory is kept but the alarm attached to it fades. Note what this predicts: physical arousal should fall while the memory stays intact, so the proper test is reactivity rather than whether the memory feels less bad.
Supporting evidence: 34 adults rated the same emotional images 12 hours apart. Reactivity fell across a night and rose across a day, and the largest drop was in those whose noradrenaline was lowest during REM (van der Helm et al., 2011).
Two stronger tests disagree and they use different methods, which makes it harder to miss. A meta-analysis of 24 studies found negative images rated as more arousing after sleep (Lipinska et al., 2022), and an experiment found participants with the least REM sleep showed the greatest overnight drop in arousal (Lara-Carrasco et al., 2009).
So sleep preserves emotional memories more reliably than it soothes them (Lipinska et al., 2019), and the model has not yet been properly tested, because removing REM disturbs every over sleep stage as well (Pesonen et al., 2024).

What dreaming adds

Dreaming is not simply the conscious experience of REM sleep. Across 111 published cases, forebrain damage stopped dreaming while REM sleep continued normally (Solms, 2000), and dreaming survives drugs that suppress REM (Scarpelli et al., 2026).
Because dreaming occurs outside REM sleep, evidence about REM sleep cannot be read as evidence about REM dreams, so dreaming has to be measured directly (Solms, 2000).
Measuring dreams is difficult: across 552 home dreams, dreamers rated their own as mostly positive while judges rated the same dreams as mostly negative (Sikka et al., 2017). So studies using different rating sources may not be comparable.
Very few studies measure both REM and dreaming in the same people. In one, participants whose dreams were less negative showed the greatest overnight improvement in their ratings of emotional images (Lara-Carrasco et al., 2009). In another, the overnight drop in reactivity appeared only in participants who recalled a dream (Zhang et al., 2024).
No study can assign anyone to dream, so the direction is unresolved. Someone already coping well might both dream less negatively and adapt better overnight, with the dream contributing nothing, and mood and REM sleep appear to influence each other in both directions (Peltz et al., 2026).
Recall creates a further problem. Whether a dream is remembered depends on the state the sleeper wakes from (Scarpelli et al., 2022), and non-recallers may have dreamed and forgotten, which makes the claim difficult to disprove.
Whether dreams regulate emotion, mirror waking concerns, or do both remains an open question (Scarpelli, 2026). Answering it requires manipulating dream content rather than recording it (Haar Horowitz et al., 2020), which is discussed further in the final section.

Theories of emotional dream function

Focus question: What might a dream be doing with emotion?

Each theory below can be separated in two ways: the first is the general shape of the dream, as the theories disagree about what a useful dream should look like on the inside, and the second is the next morning, because a dream that did emotional work overnight should leave a trace in waking life.
Three of the four theories below claim the dream does something while one claims it does not, and that is the position the other three have to beat. Two of the three also predict the same next morning, so four theories make three testable predictions (see Table 1). This matters later, because one result about next-day mood can point towards two theories at once.
Nightmares are clearest way to test each theory, because the same dream counts as either the system working for one and failing for another.

**Table 1**
*Competing theoretical accounts of the emotional function of dreaming and their predictions*
Theory	What the dream does to the feeling	Next-day mood after a distressing dream	What a nightmare is
Continuity	Nothing, it expresses the feeling	Unchanged, the dream mirrors mood without moving it	A marker of distress, and nothing more
Threat simulation	Practises with it	No better or possibly worse, the payoff is preparedness	The system working as designed
Fear extinction	Rebuilds around it	Better if extinction succeeds, unchanged or worse if it fails, which makes the prediction hard to falsify	The replay failing to build a safe version
Mood regulation	Drains it	Better: less negative mood, weaker reactivity, easier regulation	Regulation failing to complete

Continuity

Dreams express a person's ongoing concerns and leave them exactly as they found them, so the dream is meaningful but it is simply not doing anything (Domhoff, 2017).
This is the baseline the other theories have to beat, because showing that a dream is meaningful does not automatically prove that it has a function (Domhoff, 2019).
Continuity is often misread as the idea that dreams replay yesterday. Domhoff (2017) argues the opposite: across three studies, independent judges could not match dream reports to the events or concerns participants had reported before sleep, so the dream tracks the person's current preoccupations rather than their day. Schredl (2017) replies that this reading is selective, and that day-to-day material appears in dreams more often than Domhoff allows.
The theory makes its own prediction: dream emotion should rise and fall with waking distress without ever predicting improvement in it. For Natalie, that means that the dream keeps returning and her mood keeps tracking it, with the dream itself contributing nothing either way.

Threat simulation

The second theory says the dream is rehearsal. Dreaming builds simulations of threatening situations so that the skills of noticing and escaping danger get practiced in a safe way, so what it produces is preparedness. A nightmare is the system doing its job well (Revonsuo, 2000).
If that is right, dream threats should look like real ones and dreamers should often get away. They do neither: in a large sample of recurrent dreams, 34% contained no threat at all, fewer than 15% contained a threat that was realistic, and fewer than 20% ended in successful escape (Zadra et al., 2006). Realism matters here because the theory itself requires dream threats to resemble the dangers people actually face.
The supporting evidence is real but indirect. Revonsuo (2000) relies on the finding that negative emotion dominates dreams and that aggression is the most common social interaction. But dreamers tend to rate their own dreams as mostly positive while judges rate the same dreams as mostly negative, so the result depends on who is asked (Sikka et al., 2017). There is also a gap at the end of the process as the theory requires implicit learning during sleep to transfer to waking behaviour, which has not been demonstrated (Domhoff, 2019).
For Natalie, It predicts a dream that leaves her better prepared for abandonment without leaving her any calmer, which is a poor fit for coping.

Fear extinction

The third theory says that the dream takes a frightening memory and replays it somewhere safe. This does not erase the fear: extinction builds a competing memory alongside it, which is why the fear returns if the safe memory is not maintained. A nightmare is the process failing: the replay stays frightening and no safe version gets built (Nielsen & Levin, 2007).
This model has a clinical test case to point to, since disrupted REM sleep and impaired extinction memory have been proposed to maintain post-traumatic stress disorder (Pace-Schott et al., 2015).
It also has some direct support: cathartic dreams, which move from danger to relief, were less common in patients with nightmare disorder than in healthy sleepers, and were the only kind of dream whose increase tracked falling depression scores during therapy (Perogamvros et al., 2025). The samples were small, so this points in the right direction without settling anything.
Its weakness is logical: a good dream and a nightmare are attributed to the same process, with success and failure identified afterwards by the very result they were meant to explain. As stated, no next-morning finding can count against the theory. It also has nothing to say about the roughly one third of dreams that are positive (Weiss, 2007). The theory only becomes testable once a successful dream can be recognised from its content in advance, which is what the cathartic dreams category is trying to do.
On this account Natalie's dream is a replay that never reaches safety.

Mood regulation

Dream emotion is proposed to shift from negative toward positive across the night, so the memory arrives in the morning with less charge attached (Cartwright et al., 1998). This is the account closest to the everyday idea that dreams work through problems, and it makes the clearest predictions: after a negative dream, mood should be less negative, reactivity to negative material should be weaker, and emotion regulation should be easier (Sikka et al., 2022).
The overnight shift has been tested directly and did not appear. Waking people repeatedly throughout the night, Palmieri et al. (2025) found that emotional intensity in dreams increased as the night went on, and the increase was not driven by REM awakenings. The sample was small, but this does test the core claim instead of using a stand in for it.
Two findings do support the theory, and both are correlational. Dreamers who rated their dreams more positively than an independent judge reported better morning mood (Barbeau et al., 2022), and people who reported more fear in dreams showed weaker fear-related brain responses while awake (Sterpenich et al., 2020). Neither design can show which way the arrow points, since someone already coping well might dream more gently than and feel better for the same underlying reason.
The theory predicts that Natalie's dream should be losing intensity week by week, which it is not.

Dream emotion and waking coping

Focus question: What does dream emotion predict for waking coping?

Coping is what a person does while awake to manage stress (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004). For dreaming to contribute to it, dream emotion has to predict something in that waking process.
One objection is that a sleeping person cannot be trying to cope, but emotion regulation doesn't have to be conscious or deliberate to count (Gross, 2015).
Coping breaks into three increasingly demanding tests: does dream emotion change how a person eels, how well they manage emotion, and whether they adapt to a real stressor? The answer differs for each, which is why this literature looks more contradictory than it is.

Does dream emotion change how people feel?

One five day study in 40 adults tested all three mood regulation predictions at once. The first result was that more negative dream emotion predicted a more negative morning (Sikka et al., 2022).
The largest study agrees: across 4,715 days from 536 adults, frightening dreams were followed by about 7% more negative mood the next morning (Baber et al., 2026).
But which dream is counted changes the answer. Across up to 21 mornings in 191 adults, ordinary dreams were followed by less negative emotion the next day, and so were nightmares, against the authors own prediction. Bad dreams changed nothing, and bad dreams plus nightmares in the same night were followed by more (Tousignant et al., 2022).
Dreams high in both fear and joy predicted mornings with no negative mood at all, and more joy in dreams predicted more positive mood (Baber et al., 2026). Roughly a third of dreams are positive (Weiss, 2007), yet a theory about mood improving has mostly been tested by measuring only what makes mood worse.

Does dream emotion change how well people manage emotion?

Feeling better is not the same as coping better. Coping is about handling what comes next, so the harder test is whether dream emotion predicts how a person responds to something upsetting.
Tested directly, it does not. In the same five day study, dream emotion had no link to reactivity to upsetting images or to the ability to calm those reactions down, and Bayesian analysis supported both null results (Sikka et al., 2022).
This is the strongest single result against the mood regulation account, because it is evidence for no relationship rather than a failure to find one.
This appears to flip when people are compared with each other instead of with themselves: those who had more frightening dreams overall regulated emotion better while awake (Baber et al., 2026).
These are different questions, since comparing a person with themselves asks whether last nights dream helped, and comparing people asks what sort of person has fearful dreams, so only the first tests the theory.
Much of the apparent disagreement in this literature comes from between-person findings being read as answers to a within-person question.

Does dream emotion predict adapting to a real loss?

Coping is defined against a stressor, so the strongest test is where there is a real one.
Over five months of REM awakenings in 20 depressed and 10 non-depressed adults going through a divorce, those still depressed at follow-up did dream about their ex partner, but the dreams had no emotion in them and no links to other memories. Those who recovered had emotional dreams about the same person, so it was the emotion in the dream rather than its subject that tracked recovery (Cartwright et al., 2006).
The same pattern appears after a death: in 77 adults with complicated grief, dreams contained far less negative emotion than published norms, 21% against 80% of dreams in women (Germain et a;. 2013).
The direction therefore reverses at this level. That is not a contradiction of the previous subsection, because both the outcome and the people have changed. Emotion in a dream predicts a worse morning day to day, but tracks the people who are adapting when there is a genuine loss to adapt to.
For Natalie, feeling the loss in the dream is a better sign than dreaming about it with no emotion, what is wrong is that the feeling is not fading.

What coping research is still missing

All three tests above use mood, reactivity, or recovery but none measure what a person actually does to manage stress, which is what coping means (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004).
The one study to measure both found that people who used positive reappraisal while awake had more problem-solving in their dreams, but that those who dreamt about the stressor reported less problem solving awake (Delorme et al., 2002). It used 22 dreamers and a mild stressor, and it is close to the whole literature connecting dreams to waking coping behaviour.
None of this can settle whether the dream causes anything, because no study here could change a dream, the next section does.

Using dreams to improve coping

Focus question: How can dreams be targeted to improve coping?

The previous section found that dream emotion tarcks how well someone is coping without clear evidence that it drives it, which may be a real limit or only a limit of the method.
This section reverse the direction of the measurement, instead of recording a dream and looking forward to the morning, it changes something while the person is awake and then looks back at the dream. That is the only order that can show cause.

Case study: part 2

Six months on, the dream still hasn't stopped. Natalie has started staying up until she's too tired to dream, and she's tired all the time. Her psychologist suggests writing the dream down and changing what happens: this time, the person turns around, or Natalie stops calling out and walks the other way. She rehearses the new version of the dream for a few minutes every night. Within weeks the dream starts to come less often, and when it does, it bothers her less.

Imagery rehearsal therapy

Imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT) means writing down a recurring nightmare, deliberately changing how it ends, and rehearsing the new version while awake for 10 to 20 minutes a day (Morgenthaler et al., 2018).
The logic follows fear extinction: rehearsing a new ending does while awake what the theory says a healthy dream does at night.
It is the only treatment the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for nightmare disorder (Morgenthaler et al., 2018), and across 29 randomised trials it was one of the only two treatments to beat control conditions (Y. Zhang et al., 2022).
The large effects are uncontrolled: improvements in nightmares, sleep and PTSD held at 6 and 12 months across 13 studies but shrank to a small effect in the one trial that compared it against another active treatment (Casement & Swanson, 2012), and two later trials found no advantage over other sleep treatments in veterans with PTSD (Cook et al., 2010; Harb et al., 2019).
Why IRT works remains disputed: a systematic review of the proposed mechanisms found none established (Rousseau & Belleville, 2018), and 30% of patients did not respond at all (Schwartz et al., 2022).
Implication: If IRT works through waking rehearsal and changed expectations, the dream is the target of treatment rather than the agent of change.

Manipulating dream content: the missing method

A causal claim about dreaming requires manipulating dream content, which nothing in the previous sections does. Targeted dream incubation repeats a chosen theme at sleep onset: 67% of prompted awakenings produced dream reports containing the theme, against 3% of unprompted awakenings (Haar Horowitz et al., 2020). Dream content is therefore controllable.
But this is a methods demonstration rather than a treatment, even successful incubation cannot show whether the experience of dreaming matters or merely accompanies the work being done (Haar Horowitz et al., 2020).
Working the other way, an improved capacity for affect regulation within dreams accompanied improvement in personality functioning during psychotherapy, so dream content may index progress as well as be a target of it (Kempe et al., 2024).
What would settle the question is an experiment that manipulates dream emotion under real distress and measures waking coping rather than nightmare frequency. Nothing in this literature does that yet.

Conclusion

Dreams like Natalie's recur because the emotional charge attached to a memory has not faded overnight. That is the problem this chapter set out to explain.
The short answer to the subtitle is that REM dreams reflect emotional processing more reliably than they perform it. Dream emotion behaves more like a thermometer than a heater: it registers how much distress someone is carrying, but there is little evidence that it is what brings the distress down.
Sleep and dreaming are not the same thing. Sleep makes emotional memories more likely to be remembered without reliably making them feel less bad (Lipinska et al., 2019), and dreaming continues when REM sleep is supressed (Solms, 2000). Only two studies have tested whether the dream itself adds anything (Lara-Carrasco et al., 2009; J. Zhang et al., 2024).
Four theories disagree about what a dream is for and they can be separated by what each predicts about the following morning (see Table 1).
The prediction that matters most for coping is the mood regulation one and it fails. Dream emotion predicts a worse next morning rather than a better one, and predicts nothing about reactivity or about the ability to regulate emotion (Sikka et al., 2022; Baber et al., 2026), so it looks more like a sign of how well someone is coping than the thing doing the coping.
Coping itself has almost never been measured, every finding above uses mood, reactivity or clinical recovery as a stand in for what a person actually does to manage stress (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004; Delorme et al., 2002).
Dreams can still be changed on purpose: rewriting a recurring nightmare reduces both how often it happens and how much distress it causes (Morgenthaler et al., 2018), though whether the rewriting is the active ingredient is unresolved (Cook et al., 2010; Harb et al., 2019; Schwartz et al., 2022).
Settling the wider question means controlling dream content rather than only recording it (Haar Horowitz et al., 2020; Schwartz et al., 2022), and measuring coping rather than nightmare frequency.
Natalie's dream did not repair itself, and it did not need to. What changed it was practising a new ending while awake.

Take-home messages

A bad dream is not a sign that emotional processing is doing its job, dream emotion tracks distress rather than relieving it.
Dreaming may still add something, but the evidence is thin and comes from a handful of studies that could not assign anyone to dream.
"Sleep on it" is reasonable advice for retaining a memory, but not a reliable way to feel better about it.

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External links

How to prevent nightmares (Sleep Foundation)
Sleep, dreams and mental health (The Sleep Science Pod)
Targeted dream incubation (MIT Media Lab)
The science of dreams and nightmares – what is going on in our brains while we're sleeping? (The Conversation)