The Most Common Dreams About COVID-19

COVID-19 has created a ‘shared mindscape’ in people’s dreams.

COVID-19 has infected the dreams of around 50 percent of people, a new artificial intelligence study has found.

The most common bad dreams are worrying about failures in social distancing, forgetting to wear a mask, getting the disease itself and even the end of the world.

Bad dreams may be one way for the brain to process and so reduce the fear related to the virus.

Also, dreams about social distancing failures may be a learning mechanism for the new rules.

Data from over 4,000 people in Finland during the sixth week of lockdown showed many dreams were linked to the pandemic.

Over 50 percent reported sleeping more during the pandemic and over 25 percent reported more frequent nightmares.

Dr Anu-Katriina Pesonen, the study’s first author, said:

“We were thrilled to observe repeating dream content associations across individuals that reflected the apocalyptic ambience of COVID-19 lockdown.

The results allowed us to speculate that dreaming in extreme circumstances reveal shared visual imagery and memory traces, and in this way, dreams can indicate some form of shared mindscape across individuals.

The idea of a shared imagery reflected in dreams is intriguing.”

The data from the study was crowdsourced, with almost 4,000 providing information on stress and sleep and a subset of around 800 describing their dreams.

The most common dreams about COVID-19 were about breaking social distancing rules, difficulties travelling, personal protective equipment and the apocalypse.

Typical social distancing worries included mistake-handshakes, accidental hugs and trying to social distance in a crowd of people.

Artificial intelligence was used to analyse the data, Dr Pesonen explained:

“The computational linguistics-based, AI-assisted analytics that we used is really a novel approach in dream research.

We hope to see more AI-assisted dream research in future. We hope that our study opened the development towards that direction.”

AI allowed the researchers to build ‘dream clusters’ from ‘smaller dream particles’, which were based on frequently appearing pairs of words.

Thirty-three dream clusters emerged with more than half being related to the pandemic.

Dr Pesonen said:

“Repeated, intense nightmares may refer to post-traumatic stress.

The content of dreams is not entirely random, but can be an important key to understanding what is the essence in the experience of stress, trauma and anxiety.”

Unsurprisingly, many people reported higher stress during the pandemic and this was linked to worse sleep and bad dreams.

Source: https://www.spring.org.uk/2020/10/dreams-covid-19.php