The key facts
- Phones are mentioned in 3.55% of women's and 2.69% of men's dream descriptions, cars in 8–9%
- Possible reasons: the emotional significance of dreams, changes in brain activity during REM sleep, and memory features
- The statistics are based on written descriptions, so the actual frequency of phones appearing in dreams cannot be established
A rare guest in dreams
The smartphone accompanies a person almost around the clock, yet it appears in dreams surprisingly rarely. This pattern was noticed by dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley, who studied more than 16,000 dream reports from a scientific database. Mentions of phones — not only smartphones, but any phones at all — were found in just 3.55% of women's and 2.69% of men's descriptions. For comparison: cars, which a person may not use every day, appeared in roughly 8–9% of the reports. The Daily Mail reports on this.
Three possible explanations
One version is tied to the emotional significance of what happens: in dreams a person more often encounters fears, desires, relationships and important memories, while the phone itself carries no meaning — a message from a loved one or an alarming call matters more than the device through which it arrives. Another explanation concerns how the brain works: during REM sleep, when many vivid dreams occur, the activity of areas responsible for logical thinking and self-control changes, so habitual actions lose their meaning. If a phone does appear in a dream, a person often finds they cannot dial a number or read a message. Finally, memory plays a role: after waking, unusual and emotionally charged episodes are remembered better, while ordinary screen scrolling may simply not be retained in memories of the dream.
Data limitations and related research
Science does not yet have a definitive answer. The statistics are based on written descriptions of dreams, so they do not reveal how often people actually see phones in their dreams but forget about it after waking; moreover, the results do not mean that smartphones cannot appear in dreams at all. A separate line of research is lucid dreaming: Life.ru previously reported on an experiment with virtual reality, in which volunteers trained to notice oddities in the virtual world and ask themselves whether they were dreaming. After a month of training, participants in the experimental group reported lucid and partially lucid dreams about four times more often than one of the control groups; however, researchers have not yet proven that the effect was caused specifically by virtual reality.
