From 1989 to 1991, Blagrove was a research fellow at Loughborough University in the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences. Since 1991, Blagrove has worked at Swansea University in Wales, initially as a lecturer, then senior lecturer, reader, and finally professor of psychology. He specializes in the study of "the relationship between sleep and cognition, including effects of sleep loss, memory consolidation functions of sleep, causes and possible functions of dreaming, nightmares, and lucid dreams." Blagrove is Director of the Swansea University Sleep Laboratory, which "investigates sleep, dreaming, and what happens when people are deprived of sleep." He is a past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a Consulting Editor for the journal Dreaming, published by the American Psychological Association on behalf of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.
Selected research
Suggestibility
An early study by Blagrove in 1996 showed that sleep deprivation causes a trend for greater suggestibility during interrogation. That is, they "have reduced cognitive ability or motivation to discriminate and detect discrepancies between original and misleading information."
Dream-lag
One of Blagrove's series of findings concerns the "dream-lag effect". A study in 2011 "investigates evidence, from dream reports, for memory consolidation during sleep". A second study in 2015 shows that "incorporation of details from waking life events into Rapid Eye Movement sleep dreams has been found to be highest on the night after, and then 5–7 nights after events.". A third study into the "dream-lag effect" in 2019 was "the first to categorize types of waking life experiences and compare their incorporation into dreams across multiple successive nights." The chosen categories were: major daily activities ; personally significant events ; and major concerns, and participants were asked to maintain diary entries both for these categories of waking experience, accompanying emotion and its intensity, and to record their dreams. The study found that "personally significant events persist, but not major daily activities or concerns."
A study by Blagrove in 2013 looks into largely-anecdotal claims that "dreams can be a source of personal insight", and finds tangential support for the "facilitative effect of sleep on cognitive insight" and of REM sleep on emotional memory consolidation, and for the emergence of insight from the metaphorical representations of waking life found in dreams. Another study in 2015 also showed theoretical support for such claims, finding that rapid eye movement sleep plays a role in the "consolidation of emotional memories and the creative formation of connections between new and older memories." A third study in 2020, assessing Exploration-Insight scores following discussion of REM dreams, non-REM dreams, and daydreams, suggests that "insight might be produced by embodied and metaphorical thinking in dreams."
DreamsID
DreamsID is a practical, collaborative project between artist Dr. Julia Lockheart and Mark Blagrove. They hold 50–60 minute sessions with the dream subject and an invited audience, and while the subject shares their dream, with Blagrove helping to facilitate and visualize the dream narrative, Lockheart draws and paints the dream, in real-time, on a torn-out page from Sigmund Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams, to create "a tapestry of elements, plot, metaphoric imagery, and Freud's words." Then, later in the session, the audience is invited to join in the discussion, referencing the dream to waking life, according to the method devised by psychiatristMontague Ullman. In the course of the sessions, Lockheart and Blagrove began to notice that the sharing of the dreams and the discussions were having an effect not only on them but on some of the audience, and that the sessions were invoking empathy toward the subjects sharing their dreams. As a result of this, the collaborators went on to co-author an important scientific paper, "Testing the Empathy Theory of Dreaming: The Relationships Between Dream Sharing and Trait and State Empathy", which was later published in Frontiers in Psychology. As well as being an artist, Julia Lockheart is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Senior Lecturer at Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Her own research includes "languaging within metadesign and the relationship between writing and collaboration in arts education." In April 2019, the BBC World Service Television programme CrowdScience broadcast a segment in which Lockheart is shown painting as a candidate shares her dream.
Publications
Articles in journals
Blagrove has authored or co-authored over 50 academic and research papers, published in peer reviewed scientific journals, during his career:
