Figure 1

The phenomenological characteristics of dreams and different categories of waking thought. Mean ratings for dreams (green solid line) are plotted on a Spider plot, along with each of four waking thought categories. Note that the anchors for the rating scales were different for some of the characteristics (see Tables S1 and S2), but generally ranged from 0 (Not at All) to 1 (Very Much So). Valence ranged from 0 (Very Negative) to 1 (Very Positive). Stimulus dependent thoughts are plotted in red and stimulus-independent thoughts are plotted in blue. Task-related thoughts are plotted in dotted lines and task-unrelated thoughts are plotted as dashed lines. Across the phenomenological characteristics, dreams were most similar to stimulus-independent task-unrelated thought and stimulus dependent task-unrelated thought.