Dreams and Intelligence: Do Smart People Dream More?

No good study shows that more intelligent people dream more, dream more vividly, or remember more of their dreams. How often people recall dreams is linked weakly to creativity, openness to experience and interest in dreams, and in one large study all the personality and creativity factors together explained only 8.4% of the differences between people in dream recall.

Almost everyone dreams, so the real question is who remembers their dreams and whether that says anything about ability. This article looks at the research on dream recall, lucid dreaming, dreams and learning, and nightmares, and explains why the "smart people dream more" idea keeps circulating.

People differ enormously in how often they recall a dream. In a brain-imaging study by Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub and colleagues, "high recallers" remembered about 5.2 dreams a week on average, and "low recallers" about 0.5. High recallers showed more activity at rest in two brain areas (the temporoparietal junction and the medial prefrontal cortex) that are part of the "default mode network," a set of regions active when the mind is not focused on an outside task.

What explains these differences? The most thorough early answer came from Michael Schredl and colleagues, who measured personality, creativity, visual memory, attitude toward dreams and sleep behaviour in 444 participants at once. Four factors were linked to dream recall: personality (openness to experience, "thin boundaries" and absorption), creativity, waking during the night, and attitude toward dreams. Together they explained only 8.4% of the variation, and each single factor explained less than 3%.

Other studies agree that the correlations are small:

• Personality: Mark Blagrove and Lucy Akehurst found that in 93 students, dream recall correlated only marginally with neuroticism (r = .20) and with how suggestible people were (r = .21), and had very low correlations with other traits, including need for cognition.

• Creativity and memory: Raphael Vallat and colleagues compared 28 high recallers with 27 low recallers. The high recallers scored higher on a creativity test and showed greater default mode network connectivity, but there was no significant difference in memory abilities, including a digit span test of working memory.

• Attention and working memory: Salomé Blain and colleagues found no difference between high and low recallers in how working memory load affected performance. High recallers were more easily disrupted by hard-to-ignore sounds, which suggests that light sleepers who are more sensitive to their surroundings may wake briefly and catch a dream.

• Daily habits: In a 2025 study of 217 adults, Valentina Elce and colleagues found that a positive attitude toward dreaming, a tendency to mind-wander and sleep patterns predicted reporting a dream on waking, and age predicted whether the dream's content could be recalled.

None of these studies measured IQ with a full-scale intelligence test, and none found a memory or working memory advantage for frequent dreamers. Since working memory is one of the abilities most closely tied to general intelligence, that is a reasonable sign that dream recall has little to do with IQ. Mind-wandering, which shows up in the 2025 study, is covered in our article on daydreaming and intelligence.

A "lucid dream" is one in which the dreamer realises they are dreaming. A meta-analysis by David Saunders and colleagues estimated that about 55% of people have had at least one lucid dream and about 23% have them at least once a month.

Patrick Bourke and Hannah Shaw compared frequent, occasional and non-lucid dreamers on a set of word problems designed to measure "insight," the sudden solution of a problem. Frequent lucid dreamers solved significantly more insight problems than non-lucid dreamers. This is an interesting link, but it is one small correlational study using one kind of puzzle, and it does not show that lucid dreamers have higher general intelligence or that learning to dream lucidly would make anyone smarter.

Sleep clearly helps memory, and a few studies suggest that dreams can reflect that process.

• Dreaming of the task: Erin Wamsley and colleagues trained 99 students on a virtual maze, then let 50 of them nap. The four nappers (8%) who reported dreaming about the maze improved about ten times more than other nappers. All four had been among the weakest performers at the start, so the dreams may reflect the brain working on a task that was still hard for them. Thinking about the maze while awake did not predict improvement.

• Sleep and insight: Ullrich Wagner and colleagues trained people on a sequence task that contained a hidden rule. After a night of sleep, more than twice as many people discovered the rule as after the same time awake.

• REM sleep and creative associations: Denise Cai and colleagues found that a nap containing REM sleep, the sleep stage richest in vivid dreams, helped people solve word association problems they had been exposed to earlier, compared with quiet rest or a nap without REM.

• A counterweight: Svenja Brodt and colleagues gave 62 people riddles, visual puzzles and anagrams. A three-hour break helped with riddles, but spending that break asleep gave no extra benefit.

These findings concern sleep helping people process material they have just met. They do not show that people who dream more are more intelligent, and most measured sleep stages rather than dream content. Our article on how sleep affects IQ and cognitive performance covers the wider evidence on sleep and test scores.

Vivid or disturbing dreams are sometimes taken as a sign of a rich inner life. The research links them more closely to stress and mood. In a study of 147 people who kept a two-week dream log, Mark Blagrove, Laura Farmer and Elvira Williams found that anxiety, depression, neuroticism and acute stress were associated with distress about nightmares and with how often people had unpleasant dreams.

Frequent nightmares that disturb sleep or cause distress during the day are worth raising with a doctor, who can look at sleep, stress and medication and refer you to a sleep specialist if needed.

Stories of discoveries that arrived in a dream are memorable and get retold, while the far more common experience of dreaming about nothing useful is forgotten. Brain-imaging studies of high recallers also attract headlines, and differences in brain activity are easily misread as differences in brainpower. Finally, people who are curious about their inner experience are more likely to pay attention to dreams and to read articles about them. Schredl's work suggests that attitude toward dreams is one of the stronger predictors of recall, which means the link may run from interest to recall rather than from intelligence to dreaming.

There is no evidence that they do. Studies of dream recall find small links with creativity, openness and attitude toward dreams, and none has found a memory or working memory advantage in frequent dreamers.

No study has shown that. Dream recall depends on things like waking during the night, interest in dreams, mind-wandering and age.

One study found that frequent lucid dreamers solved more insight problems than non-lucid dreamers. That is a single small study of one type of puzzle, and it did not measure IQ.

Sleep can help people find hidden patterns in material they learned that day. The evidence that dream content itself solves problems is limited to small studies.

People who recall many dreams score slightly higher on creativity measures on average. The link is small, and vivid unpleasant dreams are more closely tied to stress and mood.

Dreaming is universal, and remembering dreams says more about your sleep, habits and interest in dreams than about your intelligence. Frequent dream recall goes with slightly higher creativity and openness, lucid dreaming has one small link with insight puzzles, and sleep helps consolidate new learning. None of this adds up to evidence that smarter people dream more. To see where your reasoning ability really stands, take the RIOT IQ test.

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2. Eichenlaub, J.-B., Nicolas, A., Daltrozzo, J., Redouté, J., Costes, N., & Ruby, P. (2014). Resting brain activity varies with dream recall frequency between subjects. Neuropsychopharmacology, 39(7), 1594-1602. [doi.org/10.1038/npp.2014.6](. doi.org

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4. Vallat, R., Türker, B., Nicolas, A., & Ruby, P. (2022). High dream recall frequency is associated with increased creativity and default mode network connectivity. Nature and Science of Sleep, 14, 265-275. [doi.org/10.2147/NSS.S342137](. doi.org

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6. Elce, V., Bergamo, D., Bontempi, G., Pedreschi, B., Bellesi, M., Handjaras, G., & Bernardi, G. (2025). The individual determinants of morning dream recall. Communications Psychology, 3, 25. [doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00191-z](. doi.org

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8. Bourke, P., & Shaw, H. (2014). Spontaneous lucid dreaming frequency and waking insight. Dreaming, 24(2), 152-159. [doi.org/10.1037/a0036908](. doi.org

9. Wamsley, E. J., Tucker, M., Payne, J. D., Benavides, J. A., & Stickgold, R. (2010). Dreaming of a learning task is associated with enhanced sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Current Biology, 20(9), 850-855. [doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.027](. doi.org

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11. Cai, D. J., Mednick, S. A., Harrison, E. M., Kanady, J. C., & Mednick, S. C. (2009). REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(25), 10130-10134. [doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0900271106](. doi.org

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13. Blagrove, M., Farmer, L., & Williams, E. (2004). The relationship of nightmare frequency and nightmare distress to well-being. Journal of Sleep Research, 13(2), 129-136. [doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2869.2004.00394.x](. doi.org

Hero image: The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli, Detroit Institute of Arts, public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.