When dreams feel real: the MÖBIUS model.

Overview

1. Sleep and Brain Plasticity Centre, IOPPN, King’s College London,London, UK
2. Sleep Disorders Centre, Guy’s and St Thomas Hospital,London, UK

Abstract

A subset of dreams challenges long-standing distinctions between simulation and memory. These, so-called epic dreams, are defined by immersive realism, emotional neutrality, and persistent autobiographical salience, and can be subjectively indistinguishable from lived experience. They are often recalled with mnemonic authority. In this Perspective, epic dreaming is argued to reflect a systems-level failure of REM sleep’s containment architecture, namely a convergence of neuromodulatory disruption, hippocampal novelty-misclassification, and oscillatory instability that permits internally generated content to enter episodic memory. A probabilistic model of this failure, termed MÖBIUS, is introduced to formalise the conditions under which simulation is mis-encoded as memory.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Repository

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Code availability

Analysis scripts are archived on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18620608)73. No participant-level PSG data are included. Control PSG data are available from MASS (O’Reilly et al., 2014); access to the epic-dreaming cohort is governed as described in Data availability.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Tracing map

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Data

No dataset and no data link were found in the paper.

Data availability

The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are not publicly available owing to ethical and governance restrictions. Polysomnographic recordings and associated clinical metadata are held within the Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust Electronic Research Records Interface (GERRI) under the oversight of the Clinical Research Analytics Governance Group (CRAG) and cannot be transferred outside the Trust firewall. De-identified summary metrics underlying the figures are reported in the main text and Supplementary Tables. Specific, well-founded proposals for secondary analyses under the existing ethical approval may be directed to the CRAG for consideration.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 30 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 1 author, 2 keywords, 6 MeSH terms, 1 funder, 69 references.

Cite

This paper

Rosenzweig, I. (2026). When dreams feel real: the MÖBIUS model. Communications biology, 9(1), 412. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-026-09781-x

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