Behavioral scientists found that major life transitions in people over 60 — retirement, children leaving, the loss of a parent — produce a measurable increase in dream vividness and emotional intensity that most people dismiss as strange and that psychology says is actually the mind doing in sleep what it hasn’t been given space to do while awake
As researchers tracked thousands of people through retirement, empty nests, and loss, they discovered these life-altering moments trigger such intense dreams that participants often wake up feeling like they've lived entire second lives—yet most dismiss these nocturnal experience…