Dreaming about the 2024 U.S. presidential election may have intensified, rather than eased, people’s emotional reactions to the result, according to a study published in PLOS One. Democrats and Independents who reported election-related dreams tended to wake up feeling more negative about the election than those whose dreams were unrelated to it or who did not recall such dreams. A similar pattern appeared in some measures of how participants viewed the future, while Republicans’ responses did not depend on whether they dreamed about the election.
Researchers led by William H. Livingston surveyed 931 U.S. adults recruited through Prolific. Participants completed one questionnaire on the morning of Election Day, November 5, 2024, before polls had closed, and another the following morning, after the Associated Press had declared Donald Trump the winner. The participants reported their political identity, mood, feelings about the election, and expectations for their personal and national futures.
Around 71% of participants recalled a dream from election night, and 49% of those participants said the dream was related to the election. An analysis using GPT-4o mini classified 44% of the reported dreams as election-related, a result that closely matched participants’ own assessments. Nearly a quarter of all reported dreams directly referred to the candidates or other imagery from the 2024 election.
Simply remembering a dream was not linked to overnight changes in feelings about the election, personal prospects, or the country’s future. However, among people who recalled a dream, those who dreamed about the election showed a larger negative shift in their feelings about it. The effect was driven by Democrats and Independents: Democrats who dreamed about the election felt more negative about the election and both forms of future outlook, while Independents reported more negative feelings about the election and their personal future. Republicans’ views were broadly similar whether or not they had dreamed about the event.
The findings challenge the idea that dreaming routinely helps reduce emotional reactions after upsetting experiences. The researchers noted that dreams can incorporate emotionally significant events, particularly during rapid eye movement sleep, when brain regions involved in emotional processing are active. Previous research has produced mixed results, with some studies associating dreams with improved mood or reduced distress.
The study also found that dreams referring indirectly to the election, such as dreams about competitions or debates, or dreams involving other elections, were associated with larger overnight changes in feelings about participants’ personal futures than unrelated dreams. Dreams that directly depicted the 2024 election did not show the same association.
The authors stressed that the study was correlational and cannot establish that dreaming caused participants to feel worse. People who were more politically engaged or exposed to more election coverage before sleeping may have been both more likely to dream about the election and more emotionally affected by the result. The research relied on self-reported dreams and did not include sleep measurements. Because it examined only one night, it also cannot determine how dreaming might influence emotional adjustment over a longer period.
The paper, “The American dream: Election night dreams predict overnight change in feelings about the election and the future,” was authored by William H. Livingston, Adam L. Putnam, and Erin J. Wamsley.
Sources: PsyPost.