Sleep quality, dreams and waking mental health are intricately connected. Our group has shown that nightmares are associated with impaired emotion regulation, heightened sensory processing, and early adversity. Current research explores how sleep and dreams are altered in different patient populations, with implications for treatment of many sleep disorders (insomnia, REM behavior disorder) and mental health disorders (PTSD, psychosis) where dreaming is disturbed.

In lucid dreams, dreamers are aware that they are dreaming. Our group developed a method to induce lucid dreams with pre-sleep training and sensory stimulation. We have also demonstrated benefits of lucid dreaming on waking mood. Current research explores methods to induce lucid dreams, examine their neural correlates, and augment dream control. These are essential steps toward potential clinical applications of lucid dreaming, especially nightmare treatment.

Our prior work shows that dreams incorporate memories into their content across the night, including recent memories of the sleep lab, along with more remote memory sources. We have also found dream content is associated with learning. Current methods include serial awakenings protocols to collect a dozen dream reports overnight, and nap studies with Virtual Reality tasks completed before and after sleep. This innovative work aims to deepen our understanding of dream mechanics and to explore implications of dreaming's role in cognitive functions of sleep.

To complement laboratory methods of dream research, text mining is used to sift through increasingly large dream report datasets. The application of natural language processing techniques helps to identify trends and themes in dreams, which can provide a window into understanding their functions and significance in human psychology. Using these methods we have shown links between dream content and morning mood, and between social media content during the covid pandemic and anxious dreaming. These approaches have broad implications for better understanding population dynamics of dreaming across both laboratory and home settings.