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Sleep should be a welcome respite from the daily grind of all things in 2020. But a new study suggests that even during sleep, the mind cannot escape reality.
Research published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Psychology finds that many people have dreams and nightmares related to the pandemic.
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The study, conducted in Finland, surveyed 811 residents about six weeks after the country’s Covid-19 shutdown. Over the course of a week, the participants recorded how much they slept, as well as the content of any dreams.
Almost a third said they woke up more often at night compared to their pre-pandemic sleep patterns. More than a quarter had more nightmares, and nightmares tended to be more common among those who reported higher levels of stress.
In addition, the researchers noted specific dream patterns related to the pandemic. “Issues such as failures in social distancing, coronavirus contagion, personal protective equipment, dystopia and apocalypse were rated as specific to a pandemic,” the study authors wrote.
“We really don’t know what the biological functions of dreams are,” said Dr. Kevin Nelson, a neuromuscular neurologist affiliated with the University of Kentucky, who was not involved in the study.
“They have always been a pretty illogical way to process the fears that haunt us throughout the day,” Nelson said. “The content of dreams reflects our daytime fears.”
Overall, the research suggested 33 different groups of similar dream patterns, with more than half related to the pandemic.
Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard University, has collected more than 10,000 dream reports from around the world since the start of the pandemic. She has also found patterns that correlate with Covid-19 anxieties, such as dreams of becoming ill with the virus and metaphorical dreams that include natural disasters or violence.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Barrett said that many people dreamed of insects and monsters. “I noticed various types of flying insects, swarming,” he said, adding that some reported dreaming of “masses of writhing worms approaching them or armies of cockroaches rushing toward them.” (However, there were no reports of safer insects, such as ladybugs, Barrett said.)
One person reported a particularly terrifying nightmare that had direct links to social distancing measures. The dream involved “being attacked by invisible monsters. When they killed a person, they could jump up to 6 feet at another person,” Barrett said.
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While some people can control their dreams to some degree through lucid dreaming, that ability eludes most of us.
But there are ways to prepare the frame of mind, if you will, for the deepest and most relaxing sleep possible.
Avoiding things like watching the news and so-called doomscrolling, or going through bad news on social media late at night, would be high on Nelson’s list of ways to prepare the brain for bedtime.
He also suggests meditation techniques to “turn off part of the mind rather than ruminate on worries during the day before falling asleep.”
Instead, Barrett recommends visualizing exactly what you want to dream of before bed. “It can be a favorite person that you can’t be with during the pandemic, or a place that you would like to visit after the pandemic.
Pick one thing to focus the mind on, he said, “so there is a competing agenda.”
For Jennifer Martin, a professor of medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, having strange dreams after a crisis is quite common.
“And believe it or not, a relatively normal part of how we respond to stress,” Martin said.
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