Role of dream content in memory processing during sleep: Preliminary setup

"After acquisition memories are in a labile state followed by a period of stabilization known as consolidation. This process is particularly favored by sleep, where the new information is spontaneously reactivated in the hippocampus, transferred and redistributed in neocortical networks facilitating long term consolidation. Also, during sleep, specifically during REM sleep, new memories are integrated into the stored information. From a neuroscientific perspective, dream content is proposed to be a consequence of the memory processes that occur during sleep. Thus, the incorporation of elements about the learned tasks during wakefulness in the content of a dream, can predict the performance of the task after sleep. Here, we developed a new paradigm to study whether dream content related to a new word learning task correlates with consolidation of new words and integration into the pre-existed semantic networks."