themes, and emotions. Of a total of 299 dream reports that Stickgold collected from these individuals across the fourteen days, a clear rerun of prior waking life events—day residue—was found in just 1 to 2 percent. Dreams are not, therefore, a wholesale replay of our waking lives. We do not simply rewind the video of the day’s recorded experience and relive it at night, projected on the big screen of our cortex. If there is such a thing as “day residue,”
