The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the lives of people all over the world. But while anxiety and stress reduced the quality of sleep, researchers of lucid dreaming (LD) noted another trend: an increase in the frequency of LD and, in general, an increase in the number of lucid dreamers. A group of authors from Brazil and Austria, including Sergio Arthuro Mota-Rolim, a well-known LD researcher, studied the reasons for this trend.
The scientists attracted almost two thousand volunteers for an online survey. Their answers revealed that the probability of high frequency LD during the pandemic was 35.41% higher than before COVID-19. As the authors note, this may be due to the following factors:
– stress and anxiety that have led to an increase in the number of nightmares, which contributes to awareness as the dreamer always looks for a way out of a nightmare
– an additional stressful factor for women was domestic violence, which increased significantly during the pandemic
– people spent more time at home and, accordingly, sleep longer, which prolonged the REM sleep phase during which LDs occur
– fragmentation of sleep, an increase in the number of night awakenings due to stress
– people in general have become better at remembering dreams
Another interesting conclusion that the researchers came to was the correlation between LD and “sleep singing.” This is an REM sleep behavior disorder in which a person plays out a dream scenario with sounds and movements (a form of sleepwalking). Among the participants who noted an increase in the number of LDs, there were three times more cases of “sleep singing” than before the pandemic.
Have you noticed the connection between sleepwalking and the frequency of LD?
The article was published in September 2022 in the journal PLoS ONE.
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