A paper on the DreamEEG database, in which Naotsugu Tsuchiya (A01) and Chihiro Hiramatsu (B01) participated, has been published in Nature Communications. 

 Dream start for a database that aims to improve our understanding of conscious experience in sleep! 

 This paper is an Open Access Article; you can download the paper in Nature Communications here. We are very happy if you read this.

  A research "dream team" is collating a database to better understand how, when, and why dreams occur. The paper co-authored by 53 authors across 37 institutes across the world explains how the DREAM database has evolved to coordinate existing research and encourage more. 

 Neuroimaging studies of dreaming are essential to investigate the neurocognitive processes of consciousness during sleep, but limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. 

 For the press release, please visit here.

Paper Information

Author：William Wong, Rubén Herzog, Kátia Cristine Andrade, Thomas Andrillon, Draulio Barros de Araujo, Isabelle Arnulf, Somayeh Ataei, Giulia Avvenuti, Benjamin Baird, Michele Bellesi, Damiana Bergamo, Giulio Bernardi, Mark Blagrove, Nicolas Decat, Çağatay Demirel, Martin Dresler, Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub, Valentina Elce, Steffen Gais, Luigi De Gennaro, Jarrod Gott, Chihiro Hiramatsu, Bjørn Erik Juel, Karen R. Konkoly, Naotsugu Tsuchiya

Title：A dream EEG and mentation database

Journal： Nature Communications volume 16, Article number: 7495 (2025)

DOI：https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61945-1

Abstract:

 Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To address these issues, here we present the DREAM database—an expanding collection of standardized datasets on human sleep M/EEG combined with dream report data—with an initial release comprising 20 datasets, 505 participants, and 2643 awakenings. Each awakening consists, at minimum, of sleep M/EEG ( ≥ 20 s, ≥100 Hz, ≥2 electrodes) up to the time of waking and a standardized dream report classification of the subject’s experience during sleep. We observed that reports of conscious experiences can be predicted with objective features extracted from EEG recordings in both Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep. We also provide several examples of analyses, showcasing the database’s high potential in paving the way for new research questions at a scale beyond the capacity of any single research group.