The scientific journal Dreaming dedicated a special section in September 2020 to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our dreams. Researchers from different countries have published reports on how the content of our dreams has changed since March 2020. It turns out that COVID-19 has indeed affected our dreams: we have begun to sleep longer, remember more dreams, and have different kinds of dreams. A special term has even appeared on the network – COVID nightmares. Survey participants note that their dreams have become more bizarre, vivid, and disturbing.
Scientific American reported that 37% of people in the US have dreams about the pandemic, with 29% remembering significantly more dreams than usual. In China’s Wuhan province, where the epidemic began, 45% of nurses surveyed said they had nightmares. This percentage is twice as high as that recorded among isolation patients in psychiatric clinics. People who have had dreams about COVID-19 often describe them using the following terms: epidemic, zombies, apocalypse, signs of suffocation, fights in a supermarket, fear of being alone, or burying someone close.
An even more curious part of COVID nightmares, however, is the prevalence of insect imagery. Scientists from different countries have noted more and more dreams about swarms of wasps, ants, and beetles attacking people. According to scientists, this is how our brain constructs the simulation of a threat in a dream. The idea is that the virus is invisible and intangible. Since it is a problem that we cannot solve in waking life, we tend to transfer the emotional experience of it into our dreams, which become nightmares. Our brains rebuild the metaphorical chain as a way to find solutions in dreams in a distorted form, similar to what people with post-traumatic stress disorder experience.
Nevertheless, according to scientists, lucid dreams can help break this chain. People who have experienced COVID nightmares can overcome their fear, or at least learn to control it with the help of lucid dreams. Some scientists, including Dr. Denholm Aspy from the University of Adelaide in Australia, draw attention to the fact that “dream recall is up by about 35% for the average person.” This means that right now is the best time to practice phase-entering techniques. After all, “general dream recall ability is the strongest predictor of successfully learning lucid dreaming.”
Michael Raduga from Phase Research Center, comments: “We are talking about nothing less than a global change in dream culture. Most likely, the main factor behind this is not only the ‘invisible’ threat of the pandemic, but a change in lifestyle. In conditions of working from home, unemployment, or long vacations, we begin to sleep more. And the more we sleep, the more often we see dreams in the morning, and the better we are able to remember them. We can assume that phase experiences have also started happening more often.”
How have your dreams changed over the past year?
