Are your dreams being affected by COVID-19 pandemic?
Lots of people during this COVID-19 pandemic had strange dreams. The pandemic has caused
massive social disruption and a global recession, that led to cancelation of political,
religious and cultural events and has caused million of people to work from home, or worse,
to lose their job. So people have been very stressed and have been proving a lot of negative
emotions.
In the past, other crises and traumatic events have influenced dream contents toward more
anxious and negative dreams. This has been shown by the 11th September 2001, terrorist
attacks, the Oakland/Berkley firestorm and detention of allied troops in Nazi
prisoner-of-war camps during World War II.
Given these evidence, Deirdre Barrett has collected dreams about the COVID-19 pandemic from
2,888 dreamers via an online survey conducted between 23rd March and 15th July and compared
them to normative dreams from an earlier period. She used a text analysis program called
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to quantify
nine target dreaming themes: positive emotions, negative emotions, anxiety, anger, sadness,
biological processes, body, health, and death.
Then she compared the results to a database of dreams from before the pandemic.
Deirdre Barrett“
I have studied other dreams from periods of crisis: Americans after 9/11, Kuwaitis after the Iraqi occupation, and dreams from a Nazi POW camp. So as soon as the pandemic began, I was interested to see how these dreams would be similar to other crises and any distinctive elements they might have.
”
The survey was filled in by 1,998 women and 890 men, from 18 to 91 years, with a mean of
40.08 and an SD of 16.89. As predicted by the hypothesis, for female respondents, the mean
showed significantly lower positive emotions in their dreams and higher rates of negative
emotions, anxiety, health and death. For male respondents, the predicted higher score for
the variables health and death were the only one significant at as high a level as for
women.
Death was the variable with the largest difference for both genders and it is even higher
than
anxiety. The reason could be that waking reactions to the pandemic include not only obvious
fears of dying of the virus but also reflections on human mortality and remembrances of
deceased loved ones.
Deirdre Barrett“
Our dreams are more anxious since the pandemic began and we’re dreaming about it in a variety of ways — direct and metaphoric. Both men and women’s dreams reflect a lot of fear, and more references to illness and death than in normal times. However, these effects are even more pronounced for women, who also have more sadness, anger and other unpleasant body themes that are not significant for men.
”
In conclusion, the largest difference between pandemic and pre-pandemic dreams was death-related themes. Death themes were more than three times higher for pandemic dreams compared to normative ones. Moreover, women’s dreams have been more negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic than men’s dreams.