Correlation Between Dreams and the Pandemic

By Valerie Shim

COVID-19 has been altering our daily lives, but what we haven’t been noticing is how it has also been affecting our dreams as well.

Rise in Dreams

By early April, there has been a rise in dreams in convergence with social distancing, coronavirus, and especially with the dreams of COVID-19. Widespread changes in dreaming has been reported in the U.S. following extraordinary events such as 9/11 attacks in the 2001 and 1989 San Francisco earthquake, a surge of the magnitude was never documented. However, with the documentation of news outlets and social media over the pandemic, there is predicted to be a surge of an upwelling of dreams to occur globally all over the world.

Explanation

This phenomenon was directed to a study by assistant professor of Harvard University, and editor in chief of the journal Dreaming, initiating the COVID-19 dreams survey, Erin and Grace Gravely, the launchers of IDreamofCovid.com, Kelly Bulkeley, psychologist of religion and director of the Sleep and Dreams Database, followed by YouGov survey of 2477 American adults, and Elizaveta Solomonova, a postdoctoral fellow at the McGill University, and finally Rebecca Robillard of the Royal’s Institute of Mental Health Research in Ottowa. Polls and research about the striking variety of dreams and the mental health effects were carried out. Bulkeley’s three day poll revealed that in March, 29 percent of Americans recalled more dreams than usual, and Solomonva and Robillard noticed that 37 percent of the people had dreams about the pandemic.

Recent Discoveries

Most recent studies found qualitative changes in the dream emotions and concerns about health. Dream reports from the Brazilian adults in social isolation had high proportions of words related to anger, contamination, sadness, contamination, and cleanliness. 810 Finnish dreams showed that many word clusters were laden with anxiousness, with 55 percent of them about the pandemic. The emotions were prevalent among people who felt increased stress during the day.

A study of 100 nurses who were conscripted to treat COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China have reported that 45 percent of them faced nightmares.

Some basic biological and social dynamics may have played a key role in the unprecedented openings of the oneiric floodgates, but at least three factors have played a key role in the dream surge. They include, the disrupted sleep schedules augmenting the amount of REM sleep, threats of contagion and social distancing taxing the dream’s capacity for regulating emotions, and the social and mainstream media which amplifies the public’s reaction to the surge.

Explanation

The most obvious explanation for the surge would be the sleep patterns changing due to the lockdown. They include the high levels of insomnia in Chinese populations, especially for those of frontline workers. For those of stay at-home orders, we can blame the long commutes to work for all the improved sleep for many people. From March 13 to 27, the time that people spent sleeping rose 20 percent nationally. Longer sleep leads to an increase of dreams, and people who were able to sleep more than 9.5 hours recall that they were dreaming more than those who slept 8 hours. Relaxed schedules have also caused dreaming to occur, and when REM sleep proliferates, they get more intense and bizarre. Sleep cycles through the deep and light stages for every 90 minutes, but the pressure for the REM sleep increases at the need for deep and recuperative sleep. A circadian process, tightly linked to our 24 hour core body temperature rhythm gives the abrupt boost to REM sleep propensity late in the sleep period, and stays elevated from then.

Changes From the Pandemic

When the pandemic began, many people slept longer. Early birds turned to night owls, and as people have begun to eliminate sleep debts, they were more likely to wake up at night, and remember more dreams. Many COVID-19 dreams however, are a metaphoric reflection of the contagion and the challenges of social distancing. In normal times, we dream more about the novel experiences. People that are programmed to learn about French, dream more about French, and the replaying of fragments of experiences widely ascribe to the REM sleep and dreaming. Researchers who have documented the countless cases of dreams note that dreams are effective in assisting creative achievement.

REM sleep is to help problem solving which requires the access to the wide ranging memory associations.

So many dreams in the 2020 surge involve creative or strange attempts to deal with COVID-19 problems. Not only do we use it for problem-solving, we also need to consider dreams as functions which extinguish fearful memories and simulate social situations. REM sleeps serves to take effect in emotional regulation, and the pandemic threats that have been appearing in dreams could be explained by it. Metaphoric imagery has been occurring since dreams express an individual’s core concerns. This means, we need to draw on memories that are similar in the emotional tone but different in subject matter. The contextualization is clear in PTSD nightmares in which a person reacts to a trauma such as terror during an assault, depicted as a terror in the face of natural disasters.

Metaphoric Imagery

Metaphoric imagery, however should be understood more of constructive efforts to make sense of the disruptive events. A related process is the extinguishing of fear related to the creation of new safety memories. These possibilities reflect that memories of fearful events are almost not replayed in the entirety during the dreaming, but instead by elements of the original memory to be recombined with the newer ones.

New Theory

There has also been a theory in which the emotions of these dreams seem to range from surprise to discomfort, to stress to the nightmarish horror. These theories focus on the social simulation of the dreaming, and its function. The view of dreaming being a neural simulation of reality analogous to the virtual reality, and the notion of the simulation of social life has become the biological function to be emerged. The strong interpersonal bonds between the dreaming contribute to the stronger group structures, which help to organize against the predators and the cooperation in problem solving. Such dreams have adaptive value today, as an individual concern about other people, fine-tuned while in the simulated presence of those people. There have been other investigators that have linked this phenomenon with facilitating social perception, mind-reading, and the practice of social bonding skills.

Now to connect the dots with the pandemic dreams and social media, it is quite possible that many nightmarish dreams were amplified by the media, where a few posts of these pandemic related dreams led to a trend of posting. There is evidence that social media didn’t trigger but rather has amplified its scope of influence in the dreams that it brought to the many residents living in the contemporary society where the pandemic is a reality.