931 voters, one night's dreams, and a morning that felt worse

Polls in America start closing at midnight Berlin time, and many people will go to bed not knowing the result. A study reported on Monday asks what that night does to them¹. William Livingston, Adam Putnam and Erin Wamsley surveyed 931 American adults twice: on the morning of election day, 5 November 2024, and again between 8:00 and 9:54 Eastern time the next morning, after the Associated Press had called the race¹. The paper is published in PLOS One.

About 71% recalled a dream from election night, and 49% of those said it was about the election¹. An AI classifier, checked against human raters, put the share at 44%, and nearly a quarter of all dreams referred directly to the candidates or campaign imagery¹.

The researchers expected the old idea to hold: that dreaming softens emotional reactions overnight. It did not. Among people who recalled a dream, those who dreamed about the election showed a larger negative shift in how they felt about it¹. The effect came from Democrats and, less strongly, Independents; Republicans felt the same whether or not they dreamed of it¹. Democrats who dreamed of the election also woke up gloomier about their own future and the country’s¹. Simply recalling some dream, about anything, made no difference¹.

Read it with the caveats the authors give. It is correlational: people more invested in the result, or watching coverage until late, may be both likelier to dream of it and likelier to feel strongly¹. Everything was self-reported, sleep was not measured, and it covers a single night¹. The links were small across the whole sample, moderate within the two groups¹.

What you can take from it is modest and practical. Your mood at breakfast tomorrow is not a verdict on the country. Feelings run hot the morning after; the counting, by law, runs for weeks. If you can, switch off before the last result, sleep, and judge the news on the second day rather than the first.