![]() ![]() Social Media Amplification Effect Let’s examine each factor to see how you can mitigate the effect of COVID-19 on your dreams and reduce your anxiety in general.Threats of Contagion and Social Distancing Impeding Emotional Regulation.The research supports the hypothesis that there are 3 factors contributing to pandemic nightmares: We know that 29% of Americans are recalling more dreams than they usually do, and 37% of people are having pandemic dreams with threatening themes. These factors make this wave of nightmares both more widespread and more potent.Ī recent article in Scientific American by Tore Nielsen, professor of psychiatry and director of the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at the Université de Montréal, elegantly summarized the current research (mostly as yet unpublished) about the effect that living in a COVID-19 world has on our dreams. Historically, widespread effects on dreaming were documented after the San Francisco earthquake in 1989 and also after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in 2001, but this is the first time a global surge in dreaming has been documented, and it is the first time one has been documented in the age of social media. What Do Science and History Tell Us About Nightmares? Themes of danger, helplessness, hopelessness, and being trapped are all increasing in our subconscious dream life. Sometimes these nightmares are expressly COVID-19-related, but often they are metaphors of themes related to pandemic trauma. One of the changes that many people are experiencing is an increase in nightmares. You might find yourself obsessed with any and all news about COVID-19, or you may studiously avoid the topic all together. You might find you have difficulty concentrating, are unusually irritable, or startle more easily. You might find yourself feeling jumpy or detached. "One of the consequences of the continuity hypothesis is that many psychologists would then say, well, if the continuity hypothesis holds, then dreams work as a 'night therapist'.you relive the experiences you have during your waking life and you make sense of them," Quercia added.Whether or not we experience things personally, viruses, fires, political drama, global climate change, protests, riots, and other recent events can lead to feelings and behavior that resemble PTSD. Whereas when they dream, they go through a more emotional process," he said.Īlthough these dreams can seem alarming, Quercia said they serve a useful function. They go through a logical process of sense-making. "People, when they verbalize their experiences during the pandemic, they try to rationalize things. "Now, all of a sudden, we could actually see that balding and teeth falling out were associated with words that very much were related to anxiety, so that was a way of expressing anxiety," Quercia said. ![]() (Nokia Bell Labs/University of Copenhagen/Harvard Medical )Īs they dug into the data more, they were able to understand the relationship between these strange dreams and people's emotional experience of the pandemic. Some things we dream about are equally prevalent in our waking discussions (identified here in orange) according to the paper, Epidemic Dreams: Dreaming about health during the COVID-19 pandemic. "People were dreaming about really weird stuff, for example, teeth falling out, or bodies crumbling into sand," Quercia told Spark host, Nora Young. But what Quercia found interesting was where dreams took a more psychological, metaphorical turn. People talked about 'coughs' in tweets, for instance, and dreamed about coughs. Unsurprisingly, in many cases, dreams simply expressed a literal continuation of waking COVID concerns. The premise is that dreams are an extension of our waking life concerns, something called the continuity hypothesis, and Quercia and the team wanted to see if there was a difference between what people dreamed about, and what they talked about in waking life. Their algorithm looked for mentions of medical conditions in texts from two different datasets: thousands of 'dream reports' and nearly 60 million tweets. Quercia and the research team used machine learning to make sense of pandemic dreams at a larger scale than would be possible manually. Computer scientist and urban informatics researcher, Daniele Quercia recently co-authored a study called Epidemic Dreams: dreaming about health during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact these dreams can even be healthy.Īnalyzing our COVID nightmares at scale can reveal a lot about our emotional and psychological experience of the pandemic. Perhaps you've had nightmares where you're literally sick, or maybe they've been more abstract, where you're being attacked by animals, or your teeth are falling out. Have your dreams during the pandemic been a little odd? ![]()
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