![]() Not surprisingly, the researchers found that it was common for individuals to experience more harrowing dreams during times of extreme stress and trauma. ![]() Barrett and others analyzed dreams after the attacks on 9/11, as well as those from POWs in Nazi prison camps and Kuwaitis during the Iraqi occupation of their country in 1990. ![]() This isn’t the first time that dreams have been studied during a crisis. More than one person, she said, had dreamed they’d been banished to outer space to live by themselves.Īs the months have passed and the pandemic marches on, Barrett has seen more dreams reflecting anxiety about the reopening of businesses and schools, with germs and unsanitary environments playing prominently in the imagery. ![]() Early on, she noticed that many people dreamed about their fundamental fear of contracting the disease in late April, she observed clusters of dreams about secondary effects of the pandemic, including lack of child care, an absence of personal space, the loss of employment and isolation in lockdown. Since the onset of the pandemic, there’s been a collective shift in focus, Barrett found, possibly reflecting a progression of our general understanding of COVID-19, as well as our ever-changing circumstances. She recently published a book called Pandemic Dreams, which draws on her survey of more than 9,000 entries and makes some surprising connections. Since late March, Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., a dream expert who teaches part-time at Harvard Medical School, has been collecting descriptions of dreams from the general public. What happens during REM sleep is that this abundance of information gets sorted so that the things that are most important for us to remember get stored into long-term memory.”īecause life in the time of corona is largely one endless panic attack, it logically follows that our dreams are a reflection of that. “Dreams are essentially a hodgepodge of the multiple experiences, information, stimuli, events-all of the things that we experience in our waking life. “If you think about what dreams are, this makes perfect sense,” Alfano said. The dreams we’re having are also laden with fear and anxiety-and many of them are nightmarish and downright bizarre. Instead, I sleep until 7 a.m.-stretching my opportunity for dense REM sleep by a full hour and a half.īut it’s not just more frequent dreaming or dream-recalling that seems collectively to be taking place. to shower, dry my hair, put on makeup, pack lunches for my daughters, drop them off at day care and embark on a morning commute in the hell that is Houston traffic. Since I began working from home in March, I haven’t needed to wake up at 5:30 a.m. “People are getting to ‘sleep in’ later in the morning, and since that’s when we primarily get our REM sleep, it makes sense that people are not only having more dreams but that they’re remembering them more because they’re waking up in the midst of dream activity,” said Alfano, a professor of psychology and director of the Sleep and Anxiety Center of Houston at the University of Houston. The longer a person remains asleep, the longer and “denser” the REM sleep becomes (REM density refers to the frequency of rapid eye movements, which experts believe is a reflection of how elaborate and detailed dreaming imagery is). Dreaming occurs during rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, which mostly occurs during the second half of the night, she explained. Looking for the latest on the CORONAVIRUS? Read our daily updates HERE.Ĭlinical psychologist Candice Alfano, Ph.D. said that because so many individuals are now working from home or may have shortened work hours, a large segment of the population has found themselves sleeping in. My husband is having vivid dreams, too, as are my parents and sister even my four-year-old reported dinosaurs chasing her in the early morning hours, and unofficial polling during Zoom happy hours and work meetings only add to my tally.īut experts say this shared phenomenon can be explained-first by the fact that many of us are finally getting enough sleep. In fact, I only began experiencing them with some frequency in late March and early April-right around the time COVID-19 started spreading across the United States. These increasingly strange and terrifying dreams aren’t typical for me. I try desperately to scream for help, but I am always mute. Most recently, I walked outside without my contacts and a stranger threw a bag over my head and wrestled me to the ground-that was after my doe-eyed dog was accused of murdering a man. Since then, I’ve fallen, I’ve flown and I have swum and run tirelessly. Then, I was walking down the aisle toward a man who wasn’t my husband. First, my daughter drowned in our backyard pool.
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