Why the Coronavirus Pandemic Is Affecting Your Dreams

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As COVID-19 continues to sweep across the globe, people all over the world are having really weird dreams.
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Have you found yourself having weird, vivid dreams during the coronavirus pandemic? You’re not alone. We spoke with Dr. Dierdre Barrett, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University, to find out more about why people have been having such intense dream sessions.

Dr. Barrett is conducting a dream survey about the coronavirus pandemic, and in just over one month she has collected roughly 6,000 dreams from nearly 2,500 dreamers in an effort to better understand how the current public health crisis is affecting our dreaming.

From anxieties surrounding COVID-19 to day residue, find out more about how the coronavirus is impacting our sleep and why your dreams have potentially been more vivid than usual in this Elements.

#covid19 #dreaming #sleep #coronavirus #psychology #seeker #science #elements

Take Dr. Barrett’s dream survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/B8S75CN

Read More:

Why Covid-19 Quarantine Dreams Are Taking Over the Internet
https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-covid-19-dreams/
When you read these reports en masse, as Gravely has, the dreams are bizarre and individual, but also strikingly the same in form and tone. To sleep researchers, that makes a lot of sense. “I can’t think of another universal stressor experience like this,” says Jessica Payne, who studies sleep and stress’s influence on memory and psychological function at the University of Notre Dame. “Can you?”

I dream of covid
https://www.idreamofcovid.com/
Charlotte Beradt in The Third Reich of Dreams tracked the effect that authoritarianism and terror in Nazi Germany had on the nation’s dreamers. She found that the dreams of those under oppression were notably changed. Some of them even had the same kinds of dreams as each other, what could be called new archetypal dreams. A shared sort of processing of a collective trauma. I would hazard to say that most of us in the U.S. (though not all of us) are not navigating the same level of trauma under covid-19 as those living under the Third Reich. We are fortunate in this way. Still, these are highly unusual times. I was curious to know how the anxieties of the moment would translate to our dreams.
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