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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed almost every aspect of our life. Our dreams are no different. Right after the first blocks started, people reported having more dreams than before, with different content. This was explained by the fact that many people slept longer and woke up without alarms or without an immediate schedule.
Other people were experiencing more stress, which can also alter the dream. Now a new study, published in PLOS, has analyzed hundreds of reports on dreams before and during the lockdown to provide detailed results of the impact of the pandemic on dreams.
It proved difficult to study dreams during the COVID-19 pandemic. As it was unexpected, it was a challenge to find basic dream data against which to compare the pandemic data. A similar problem occurred when researchers aimed to study how dreams changed due to the events of 9/11 and after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.
One method is to ask participants if their dreams have changed during the pandemic compared to before. This was done in March 2020, when YouGov contacted a representative sample in the United States. Nearly 30% of participants reported being able to remember more dreams, while only 7.5% reported less dream recall. People also reported that their dreams had become more emotionally negative. However, only 8% of respondents actually reported having a dream with COVID-19 related content.
A second method is to collect written descriptions of dreams, called dream reports, and compare them with reports collected several years earlier by other authors. An online survey like this one was published by Harvard Medical School researcher Deirdre Barrett from March to July 2020. It required submission of “any dreams you have had in relation to the COVID-19 coronavirus.”
The dreams of 2,888 people were processed by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a method of computerized text analysis. Identify emotions, such as happiness or sadness, and other categories of content. The study found that pandemic dreams had more negative emotions and fewer positive emotions, compared to pre-pandemic dreams.
Improve understanding
The new study, by Natália Mota of the Federal University of Rio Grande in Brazil and colleagues, uses a third method. They collected dream reports from 67 Brazilian participants using the same procedure before and during the block. One group of participants had submitted dream reports in September and November 2019, and another had submitted them during the Brazilian blockade in March and April 2020. The two groups of participants were well matched in educational level, age, and gender distribution.
The study evaluated all the dreams remembered by the participants during each period. The dreams were therefore not selected by the participants. This is important because such selection can affect the results.
The study also used LIWC to automatically identify emotional words in dream reports. In total, 239 dream reports were evaluated. The researchers found that dream reports during the pandemic were longer, when measured in words, than pre-pandemic reports. They also noted that pandemic dreams had much more anger and sadness than pre-pandemic dreams. This effect was also found when taking into account the longer length of dream reports.
Fascinatingly, the level of anger and sadness in dreams was also related to the amount of mental suffering the person had due to social isolation during the block. This is consistent with the dream emotional regulation theory, which suggests that we process and regulate our emotions when we sleep. Pandemic dreams also had more references to contamination and cleansing. The authors link this to threat simulation theory, according to which we practice overcoming threats in the virtual reality of our dreams.
At the end of the study, participants rated how much they observed their dreams or how much they told others about them during the study. It was found that such behavior occurred more in people who were happy (versus sad), energetic (versus tired), peaceful (versus aggressive), altruistic (versus selfish) and creative (versus confused).
Perhaps people who share pandemic dreams are more likely to take the fear, anger and sadness they feel seriously – emotions we can often wipe out during waking hours. Talking about dreams with others can therefore be useful for managing emotions rather than suffering in silence.This could be because feeling positive makes you more likely to observe and share your dreams. But it may also be that considering your dreams and talking about them has these positive benefits. The latter theory is supported by the work we have conducted on the benefits of sharing dreams. In particular, we have found that discussing a dream for 30 minutes with a friend or family member and relating it to recent circumstances in waking life can empathize the listener with the person sharing the dream. This can help us feel less alone.
The authors of the new study conclude that paying attention and telling our dreams is a “relatively safe way of self-observation and mental health management that can be recommended during this time of uncertainty.” This is proof of the point of view that sharing dreams with family and friends has benefits for the dreamer and for society in general.
By Mark Blagrove, Professor of Psychology, Swansea University
This article was republished by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
(Image by Elliot Alderson from Pixabay)
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