Summary: We usually think of wakefulness and sleep as two separate worlds, but new research proves the boundary is an illusion. Using an experimental setup inspired by Thomas Edison, researchers analyzed 92 participants drifting into sleep and found that “dreaming” isn’t exclusive to the night.
By identifying four distinct mental states, including a “bizarre” dream state, the team discovered that these experiences occur across all levels of alertness. Whether you’re fully awake or in light sleep, your brain can flip into a “dream narrative” at any moment, suggesting that the content of our thoughts is independent of our state of vigilance.
Key Facts
- The Edison Technique: Following the legend of Thomas Edison, participants held a bottle that would drop as they drifted off, waking them at the precise threshold of sleep to report their immediate “hypnagogic” thoughts.
- The Four Mental States: An unbiased AI algorithm identified four distinct clusters of thought:
- C1: Fleeting, isolated recollections.
- C2: High connection to the external environment (street sounds, room temperature).
- C3: The “Dream State”, bizarre, vivid, and spontaneous (e.g., “aliens” or “ants on crossword puzzles”).
- C4: Goal-oriented, voluntary control (planning tomorrow’s schedule).
- The Major Finding: All four states, including the bizarre C3 dream state, occurred while participants were fully awake, in sleep onset, and in light sleep. You can “dream” while awake and “plan” while asleep.
- Neural Fingerprint of Bizarreness: The dream-like C3 state has a specific brain signature: reduced long-range connectivity between the frontal (reasoning) and occipital (visual) regions. This essentially allows the visual brain to “run wild” without the logical brain’s oversight.
- Paradoxical Insomnia: The study offers a breakthrough for insomnia patients who feel they “didn’t sleep a wink” despite clinical data saying they did. Their brains may simply be spending too much time in the “environment-connected” C2 state, making sleep feel like wakefulness.
Source: Paris Brain Institute
By convention, wakefulness and sleep are regarded as physiologically distinct states. It is therefore tempting to assume that the images, sensations, and ideas that cross our minds while we are awake are fundamentally different in nature from those we experience while we sleep, and especially while we dream.
“Yet this is far from obvious. Being awake is not synonymous with being attentive, fully aware of one’s surroundings, or able to act and think rationally,” explains Delphine Oudiette, co-leader of the DreamTeam.
“We now know that there is a continuum between wakefulness and sleep, with intermediate states such as mind-wandering or mind-blanking, during which certain regions of the brain may be asleep. What remained to be determined was whether the content of our thoughts also varies independently of our state of vigilance.”
To answer this question, the researchers chose to study sleep onset, the transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep.
“Sleep onset allows us to capture, within a very short time span, fluctuations in our state of vigilance, from wakefulness to sleep, and to observe the mental experiences associated with them,” says Nicolas Decat, a PhD student at the Paris Brain Institute and first author of the study.
“As we drift toward sleep, sensations, visions, and snippets of speech unfold—what are commonly called hypnagogic experiences. Tracing the evolution from ordinary thought to dream-like narrative can help us understand how a dream emerges.”
Nap experts to the rescue
To explore the transition between wakefulness and sleep, the team conducted a study with 92 participants who were accustomed to napping and trained to report the content of their thoughts upon interruption.
The researchers used an experimental setup inspired by Thomas Edison. According to legend, the inventor had a habit of falling asleep in his armchair while holding a heavy object, the fall of which would wake him at the threshold of sleep; he would then make use of the whirlwind of creative ideas that flooded his mind during this critical moment.
After each interruption of their nap—either by dropping a bottle held in the hand or by an alarm—participants were asked to describe their mental experience of the previous ten seconds, then rate it on four dimensions: bizarreness, fluidity, spontaneity, and perceived level of wakefulness. In parallel, their brain activity was continuously recorded with an EEG cap.
The researchers then let the data speak for themselves, applying a clustering algorithm that imposed no preconceived categories.
“This data-driven approach was essential for us, because in research, there is no consensus on what hypnagogic experiences actually are. It was important not to bias this exploration with our own definitions or beliefs,” says Nicolas Decat.
A brain signature of dream-like states
The analysis revealed not the two mental states one might expect—dreaming and waking thought—but four. The first (C1) was characterized by fleeting recollections (“An image of my dad crossed my mind”); the second (C2), by a high level of connection to the surrounding environment (“I was listening to the street sounds”); the third (C3), by its bizarreness (“I saw images of small aliens”); and the last (C4), by a high level of voluntary control (“I was thinking about what I would do tomorrow”).
Each of these four mental states appeared across all three vigilance stages measured: wakefulness, sleep onset, and light sleep.
“This is the major finding of our study. The mental states traditionally associated with dreaming can arise just as well when we are asleep as when we are awake. In other words, the content of our thoughts does not follow the boundaries between waking and sleep!
“One of our participants, while awake, reported seeing ants crawling on her body against a backdrop of crossword puzzles. Conversely, another participant mentally went through his schedule for the next day while he was fully asleep,” adds the researcher.
The team then went further, searching for neurophysiological markers specific to each mental state. By analyzing the complexity of the EEG signal, its spectral power, and the functional connectivity between brain regions, the researchers identified distinctive signatures.
They show that there is a specific brain signature for the “bizarre” C3 mental content—that is, the dream-like state. It is characterized by reduced long-range connectivity between the frontal and occipital regions of the brain.
“This signature may well be the correlate of what we feel in such a state: lucid reasoning is overtaken by a whirlwind of vivid sensations characteristic of dreams,” suggests Nicolas Decat.
Mental activity and introspection
If dreaming is not specific to sleep, why do we have the impression that extravagant mental content occurs only in the depths of the night, when we are oblivious to the world around us?
“This preconception probably stems from a memory bias. We mainly remember dreams that come with strong emotions or those to which we attach particular meaning. Yet it is just as common to dream that we are working!” notes Nicolas Decat.
“Conversely, some people report that fanciful daytime thoughts—elusive, like fragments of a dream—sometimes surface during their everyday activities. Because these thoughts are seen as incongruous, they may well be more frequent than we imagine, but we tend to dismiss them.”
Potential applications for sleep disorders
We are generally not very good at judging our own level of vigilance or describing the content of our thoughts. As a result, some people suffering from insomnia regularly complain of spending entire nights without sleeping, even though polysomnographic measurements taken in sleep clinics indicate otherwise.
This is what we call paradoxical insomnia: a mismatch between the patient’s experience and clinical observations based on conventional sleep-stage criteria.
“These criteria are probably inadequate. Our study proposes a new one—mental content— which may be better aligned with what these patients actually experience. Through this lens, some of them may spend an unusually long time in an alert state (C2), hyperconnected to the outside world, or, conversely, very little time in a dream-like state (C3), blurring the line between their waking and sleeping lives,” explains Delphine Oudiette.
“Beyond giving patients’ reports the weight they deserve, this approach paves the way to identifying objective markers of insomnia.”
Key Questions Answered:
A: We often dismiss these flashes of “bizarre” thought as mind-wandering or simple distractions. Because they are fleeting and lack the heavy emotional weight of a 3:00 AM nightmare, we tend to filter them out of our memory.
A: Yes. The transition state between wakefulness and sleep is a “creative sweet spot.” By catching yourself right as you drift off, you can access the C3 bizarre state where the brain makes unusual associations that your logical, waking brain would normally reject.
A: Scientifically, yes. This study suggests that the brain’s internal narrative doesn’t check your “vigilance status.” If the connectivity between your frontal and occipital lobes drops, you are technically in a dream state, regardless of whether your eyes are open or closed.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by our staff.
About this consciousness research news
Author: Marie Simon
Source: Paris Brain Institute
Contact: Marie Simon – Paris Brain Institute
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Dream-like mental states can occur during wakefulness” by Nicolas Decat, Arthur Le Coz, Jade Sénéchal, Ilona Scellier-Dekens, Hannah de Verville, Rubén Herzog, François-Xavier Lejeune, Isabelle Arnulf, Thomas Andrillon, and Delphine Oudiette. Cell Reports
DOI:10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117237
Abstract
Dream-like mental states can occur during wakefulness
A popular view holds that mental experiences uniquely differ between wakefulness and sleep, yet recent work suggests continuity across these stages.
Here, we address this question by examining the wake-sleep transition, a window marked by rapid shifts in wake/sleep stages and mental experiences.
We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) activity in 92 participants during two daytime resting periods. Participants reported their mental content and scored it along four subjective dimensions (bizarreness, fluidity, spontaneity, and wake perception).
Clustering mental experiences (N = 375) based on these scores reveals four clusters with distinct phenomenological profiles. Strikingly, all these mental states emerge across wakefulness, N1 sleep, and N2 sleep. We identify EEG features of spectral power, complexity, and connectivity that differentiate mental states independently of wake/sleep stages.
Our findings show that the waking and sleeping brain can produce the same mental state and demonstrate that fine-grained brain dynamics shape the content of mental experiences.
