Pandemic Dreams

I’m sure it can’t just be me that is having way more dreams during the pandemic, and I still do. Many feel so real and vivid. The struggle is that they are very mixed up; different places I have worked, people I have worked with, friends from high school, college, various camps right up to the present.

I woke up one morning convinced that my daughter had come home in the middle of the night. It felt so real I went to check her bedroom. Turns out it was also Wednesday, not Sunday. Dreams often don’t make sense. 

Often it’s people I haven’t seen in a while, or longer. And it usually leaves me lying awake after I get one of these vivid dreams. While I’m awake, it has become my habit to pray for the person who has been brought to my mind by the dream. 

I wondered if it was just me. After asking some friends, I discovered it’s not just me, so I’m nit completely crazy. So I wanted to learn some more and find out the why behind the more vivid dreams. Here is part of what I discovered. 

COVID has altered our dream worlds: how much we dream, how many of our dreams we remember and the nature of our dreams themselves. Although widespread changes in dreaming had been reported in the U.S. following extraordinary events such as the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, a surge of this magnitude had never been documented. This upwelling of dreams is the first to occur globally and the first to happen in the era of social media, which makes dreams readily accessible for immediate study. As a dream “event,” the pandemic is unprecedented. *

One obvious explanation for the surge is that sleep patterns changed abruptly when lockdowns took effect. Stay-at-home orders, which removed long commutes to work, improved sleep for many people. Some 54 percent of people in Finland said they slept more after lockdown. Overall, time asleep in the U.S. increased almost 20 percent nationwide. *

* http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-covid-19-pandemic-is-changing-our-dreams/