the 'we're in this together' mantra includes nightmares
covid-19 has us dreaming about murder and 'mistake' hugs.
2 minute read
'cottage,' 'lake,' 'hiding,' 'quarantine,' 'forest,' and 'screaming' were just some of the words that were recurring in study participants' descriptions of their dreams.
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2020 feels like a bad dream, and we’re all not only living it — we are also sleeping it.
in a study published in frontiers in psychology, finnish researchers used artificial intelligence to help analyze the dreams of 811 people. they found that while over half of people were sleeping more since the pandemic began, 10 per cent were having a harder time falling asleep, and more than a quarter were waking more frequently during the night. nightmares were most consistent in the groups that reported the highest levels of stress.
while nightmares aren’t that much fun for you and i, the researchers were intrigued by the commonality in what people were dreaming about.
“we were thrilled to observe repeating dream content associations across individuals that reflected the apocalyptic ambience of covid-19 lockdown,” said lead author dr. anu-katriina pesonen, head of the sleep & mind research group at the university of helsinki.
“the results allowed us to speculate that dreaming in extreme circumstances reveal shared visual imagery and memory traces, and in this way, dreams can indicate some form of shared mindscape across individuals.”
pesonen and her team found 33 “dream clusters” or themes, 20 of which were classified as bad dreams. fifty-five per cent of which were specifically related to the pandemic.
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more stress, more nightmares
for people whose stress levels increased during the pandemic, nightmares tended to have revolve around unnerving scenarios like overcrowding, falling, murder in the night, an elderly person in trouble, apocalypse, being chased and danger. pandemic-related dreams were more common in the stressed-out category and included people who flaunted physical distancing, such as mistake hugs, crowds, and parties.
people whose stress levels remained the same or lowered during lockdown had nightmares about obstacles that prevented them from going home, falling into dark water, being lost in a city, disregard of physical distancing, and isolation anxiety. they also dreamt of caring for their family, school parties, and people from the past.
more than half of the participants reported feeling increased stress, which was linked to bad dreams and irregular sleep.
“repeated, intense nightmares may refer to post-traumatic stress,” says pesonen. “the content of dreams is not entirely random, but can be an important key to understanding what is the essence in the experience of stress, trauma and anxiety.”
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