“We discovered that people who report dreaming show greater emotional memory processing, suggesting that dreams help us work through our emotional experiences,” says corresponding author Sara Mednick, professor of cognitive sciences and lab director at the University of California, Irvine. “This is significant because we know that dreams can reflect our waking experiences, but this is the first evidence that they play an active role in transforming our responses to our waking experiences by prioritizing negative memories over neutral memories and reducing our next-day emotional response to them.”

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