COVID-19 infects most bad dreams, study finds

COVID-19 has turned 2020 into a nightmare for many people, as they struggle with health problems, economic uncertainty, and other challenges. Now a team of researchers from Finland has proof that the pandemic is indeed a bad dream. In an article published in Frontiers in psychology, the scientists used artificial intelligence to help analyze the content of the dreams of nearly 1,000 people and found that the new coronavirus had infected more than half of the reported distressed dreams.

Researchers obtained data on sleep and stress for more than 4,000 people during the sixth week of the COVID-19 lockdown in Finland. About 800 respondents also contributed information about their dreams during that time, many of which revealed shared anxiety about the pandemic.

“We were excited to observe the recurrence of dream content associations between individuals that reflected the apocalyptic environment of the COVID-19 lockdown,” said lead author Dr. Anu-Katriina Pesonen, Director of the Mind and Sleep Research Group. from the University of Helsinki. “The results allowed us to speculate that dreaming in extreme circumstances reveals shared visual images and memory traces, and in this way, dreams may indicate some form of shared mental landscape between individuals.”

“The idea of ​​a shared image reflected in dreams is intriguing,” he added.

Pesonen and his team transcribed the content of the Finn’s dreams into lists of English words and fed the data into an artificial intelligence algorithm, which looked for associations of frequently occurring words. The computer built what the researchers called dream clusters from “smaller dream particles” rather than full dreams.

Eventually, 33 dream groups or themes emerged. Twenty of the dream groups were classified as bad dreams, and 55 percent of them had pandemic-specific content. Topics such as failures in social distancing, contagion of coronavirus, personal protective equipment, dystopia and apocalypse were classified as specific to a pandemic.

For example, word pairs in a dream group labeled “Ignore distancing” included hug-mistake, hug-handshake, handshake-restraint, handshake-distancing, distancing-indifference, distancing-crowd, restriction-crowd and party-crowd.

“The AI-assisted analytics based on computational linguistics that we use is really a novel approach in dream research,” said Pesonen. “We look forward to seeing more AI-assisted dream research in the future. We hope our study has opened development in that direction.”

The study also provided information on people’s sleep patterns and stress levels during pandemic lockdown. For example, more than half of those surveyed reported sleeping more than before the self-quarantine period, although 10 percent had more difficulty falling asleep and more than a quarter reported having more frequent nightmares.

Unsurprisingly, more than half of the study participants reported increases in stress levels, which were more closely related to patterns such as irregular sleep and bad dreams. Those most stressed also had more specific dreams of a pandemic. The research could provide valuable information for medical experts already assessing the toll the coronavirus is taking on mental health. Sleep is a central factor in all mental health problems, according to Pesonen.

“Intense and repeated nightmares can refer to post-traumatic stress,” he explained. “The content of dreams is not completely random, but it can be an important key to understanding what is the essence of the experience of stress, trauma and anxiety.”