Associations Between Autobiographical Memory and Dreaming: An Individual-Differences Approach

Autobiographical memory and dreaming are ubiquitous in everyday life. The study of their relation has largely been assessed using experimental approaches, abstracting from individual differences, despite evidence of stable individual differences in both mental processes. Here, we examined, for the first time, whether individual differences in the recollective experience of autobiographical memory (measured by the Autobiographical Recollection Test [ART]; Berntsen et al., 2019) are associated with individual differences in dreaming (measured by the Inventory of Dream Experiences and Attitudes, BeaulieuPrévost et al., 2009) in a sample of 246 participants. The ART showed consistent and robust associations with five out of seven aspects of dreaming, demonstrating that the way people generally remember their personal past is reliably related to the way they experience their dreams. The findings provide new perspectives on the role of autobiographical memory in dreaming as well as on the continuity hypothesis of dreaming.