COVID-19 Affects Our Dreams

The anxiety and stress brought on by COVID-19 affect our dreams, particularly among women, revealed new research published by the American Psychological Association in the journal Dreaming.

Women's dreams are more strongly affected by the pandemic than men's, because women bear more of the burden of caregiving, job loss, and other hardships.

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Coronaviruses infect animals, humans, and birds. Human coronaviruses, such as SARS, MERS, and 2019-nCoV cause respiratory distress and even death. The S protein is the infectious agent of the virus.

‘The pandemic has infused more anxiety and negative emotions into dreams and spurring dreams about the virus itself, particularly among women.’

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To reach this conclusion, researchers went through the results of four studies from around the world about people's dreams during COVID-19.

"All of these studies support the continuity hypothesis of dreaming: That dreams are consistent with our waking concerns rather than being some outlet for compensation, as some older psychoanalytic theories had hypothesised," said Deirdre Barrett, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University's Medical School.

"The higher levels of anxiety dreams about illness and death in general, and Covid-19 specifically, are in line with that."

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In a study by Barrett, a mother dreamed that her child's school authorities contacted her to say that the child's whole class was being sent to her condominium to be home-schooled for the pandemic duration.

"Your dreams can make you more aware of just what about the pandemic is bothering you the most -- and sharing them with trusted others is a good conversation-starter for talking about these shared feelings," a Barrett noted.

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This new study of more than 3,000 US adults surveyed in early May revealed that people who had been most strongly affected COVID-19 reported the strongest effects on their dream life: more negative dreams, heightened dream recall, and more pandemic-related dreams.

Women and people with more education reported stronger effects of the pandemic on their dreams.

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Women showed significantly reduced rates of positive emotions and increased anxiety, sadness, and anger in their pandemic dreams compared with pre-pandemic dreams.

Men's pandemic dreams showed slightly increased levels of negative emotions, anxiety, and death than in pre-pandemic dreams, but the effects were less pronounced than they were for women.

"Overall, women reported higher emotional intensity and a more negative emotional tone in their dreams, as did participants who knew people affected by Covid-19," the researchers said.

Source-Medindia