Mark Blagrove

Career

From 1989 to 1991, Blagrove was a research fellow at Loughborough University in the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences.

Since 1991, Blagrove has worked at Swansea University in Wales, initially as a lecturer, then senior lecturer, reader, and finally professor of psychology. He specializes in the study of "the relationship between sleep and cognition, including effects of sleep loss, memory consolidation functions of sleep, causes and possible functions of dreaming, nightmares, and lucid dreams."

Blagrove is Director of the Swansea University Sleep Laboratory, which "investigates sleep, dreaming, and what happens when people are deprived of sleep."

He is a past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD), a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a Consulting Editor for the journal Dreaming, published by the American Psychological Association on behalf of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.

Selected research

Suggestibility

An early study by Blagrove in 1996 showed that sleep deprivation causes a trend for greater suggestibility during interrogation. That is, they "have reduced cognitive ability or motivation to discriminate and detect discrepancies between original and misleading information."

Sensory processing sensitivity

In humans, high sensory processing sensitivity refers to greater responsivity to stimuli, slower, deeper processing, aesthetic sensitivity, and low threshold for sensory discomfort. It is measured by the highly sensitive person scale. Blagrove and colleagues have shown that score on the HSPS correlates significantly with ability to detect spoken words that are present but degraded in auditory stimuli and that the Positive Sensory Responsivity dimension of HSPS predicts perceptual advantage in detection and identification of visually degraded stimuli (Williams & Blagrove, 2024). Sensory processing sensitivity has been shown by Blagrove and colleagues to be a predisposing factor for nightmares.

Lucid dreaming

Blagrove has shown personality and cognitive characteristics of people who frequently have lucid dreams, and addressed the possibility of using training to increase individuals' frequency of lucid dreaming. However, Soffer–Dudek's review of lucid dreaming research, which included the personality findings above, concluded that there may be possible adverse effects of lucid dreaming and of induction of lucid dreaming.

Dream-lag

One of Blagrove's series of findings concerns the "dream-lag effect". A study in 2011 "investigates evidence, from dream reports, for memory consolidation during sleep". A second study in 2015 shows that "incorporation of details from waking life events into rapid eye movement sleep dreams has been found to be highest on the night after, and then 5–7 nights after events (termed, respectively, the day-residue and dream-lag effects).". A third study into the "dream-lag effect" in 2019 was "the first to categorize types of waking life experiences and compare their incorporation into dreams across multiple successive nights." The chosen categories were: major daily activities (such as going to work or university, meals and shopping); personally significant events (such as emotional events); and major concerns (such as money problems or exam stress), and participants were asked to maintain diary entries both for these categories of waking experience, accompanying emotion and its intensity, and to record their dreams. The study found that "personally significant events persist, but not major daily activities or concerns."

Dreaming, metaphor, insight, and memory consolidation

A study by Blagrove in 2013 looks into largely-anecdotal claims that "dreams can be a source of personal insight", and finds tangential support for the "facilitative effect of sleep on cognitive insight" and of REM sleep on emotional memory consolidation, and for the emergence of insight from the metaphorical representations of waking life found in dreams.

Another study in 2015 also showed theoretical support for such claims, finding that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep plays a role in the "consolidation of emotional memories and the creative formation of connections between new and older memories."

A third study in 2019, assessing Exploration-Insight scores (a measure of Gains in Dream Interpretation proposed in 1996 by Clara Hill in Working with Dreams in Psychotherapy) following discussion of REM dreams, non-REM dreams, and daydreams, suggests that "insight might be produced by embodied and metaphorical thinking in dreams." The methods for assessing insights gained following group dream discussions in Blagrove's 2013, 2015 and 2019 papers were extended in Blagrove et al. (2025). This showed that interpretations of dreams by ChatGPT are rated by dreamers on average as very or moderately accurate, and with personal insight occurring, but with exploration of the dream being less thorough and involving than in dream group discussions.

Whereas Blagrove had found evidence for memory consolidation being promoted by sleep and by dreaming, he and Lockheart later suggested that dreaming might only have a function after sleep, when the dreams are shared with others. Dreams would thus be fictions produced while asleep, but which only have an effect and significance when recalled and shared after waking. This approach was expanded on in Blagrove and Lockheart (2023) The Science and Art of Dreaming, in Psyche magazine (2024), and in The Psychologist (2024), a publication of the British Psychological Society.

Blagrove has replicated Mark Solms' findings on brain damage causing the cessation of dreaming and extended these to take account of relationship with severity of brain damage.

DreamsID

DreamsID (short for "dreams illustrated and discussed" or "dreams interpreted and drawn") is a practical, collaborative project between artist Julia Lockheart and Blagrove. They hold 60 – 90 minute sessions with a dream sharer and an invited audience, and while the dream is shared and discussed, Lockheart draws and paints the dream, in real-time, on a torn-out page from Sigmund Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams, to create "a tapestry of elements, plot, metaphoric imagery, and Freud's words." This follows a Dadaist and surrealist performance aesthetic (Lockheart et al., 2021). Then, later in the session, the audience is invited to join in the discussion, referencing the dream to waking life, according to the method devised by psychiatrist Montague Ullman.

In the course of the sessions, Lockheart and Blagrove began to notice that the sharing of the dreams and the discussions were having an effect not only on them but on some of the audience, and that the sessions were invoking empathy toward the subjects sharing their dreams. As a result of this, the collaborators went on to co-author an important scientific paper, "Testing the Empathy Theory of Dreaming: The Relationships Between Dream Sharing and Trait and State Empathy", which was later published in Frontiers in Psychology.

As well as being an artist, Julia Lockheart is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Professor at Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Her own research includes "languaging within metadesign and the relationship between writing and collaboration in arts education."

In April 2019, the BBC World Service Television programme CrowdScience broadcast a segment in which Lockheart is shown painting as a candidate shares her dream.

In October 2020 and January 2021, Blagrove and Lockheart held online events to commemorate the 120th anniversaries of Sigmund Freud's patient Dora telling two dreams to Freud. The first dream was of being rescued from a burning house by her father, the second was of travelling to her father's funeral. The aim of the events was to discuss with expert panel and worldwide audience how Dora's two dreams could be related to her distressing family circumstances The two dreams were painted by Lockheart during the discussions.

In June 2023 Blagrove and Lockheart held an event at the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich, in Küsnacht, Switzerland, as part of the conference marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Institute. In recognition of the Dadaist influence on the DreamsID collaboration, in July 2023 Blagrove and Lockheart held an event at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich. Cabaret Voltaire was the birthplace of Dadaism in 1916. The two dream sharing and discussion events are detailed in Blagrove and Lockheart (2025), as part of an exploration of the relationships between Jungian psychology, Dada, and the sharing and painting of dreams.

To commemorate the centenary of the founding of Surrealism, Lockheart and Blagrove held a symposium, Methodological Approaches to Studying Dreams: Surrealism and Dreams, Film, Poetry, and Art: with Live Painting of Breton's (1924) Urinal Dream, at the 41st annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams in The Netherlands, in June 2024. In the symposium Blagrove and attendees discussed André Breton's 1924 dream of a flying urinal (Spector, 1989) while the dream was painted by Lockheart.

As part of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism's commemorations in October 2024 for the centenary of the founding of Surrealism, Julia Lockheart's painting of the flying urinal dream that André Breton had in 1924 (Spector, 1989) was chosen for exhibition at the American University of Paris. Also at the conference Lockheart and Blagrove held a Dream Salon participatory performance with live discussion and painting of an attendee's dream.

In November 2024 Lockheart and Blagrove held a Dream Salon at the Freud Museum London in which a recent dream of ceramic artist Abigail Shama was discussed and painted.

Artworks by Lockheart of dreams discussed at Dream Salons were included as part of exhibitions on the science, anthropology and art of dreaming at Musée des Confluences, Lyon, France, October 2024 to August 2025, titled Le temps d'un rêve / Within the space of a dream; with paintings being shown on The Exhibition Route section 7; and at Museum Schallaberg, Austria.