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psychology
Researchers have examined how the corona has affected our dreams - and the results are fascinating
The corona virus has changed not only the routine and habits of all of us, but, it now turns out, our dreams as well.
So why is it so employing psychiatrists from the prestigious Harvard University and what are your dreams in the days of the plague really trying to signal to you?
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Dreams
psychology
Walla!
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Friday, 20 August 2021, 07:23 Updated: 07:41
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Did it ever happen to you that you were talking in front of a hall full of people, you looked down, you were horrified to find that you were completely naked - and then you woke up and realized that it was all a dream?
Congratulations, you too have experienced one of the most common dreams in the world, reflecting anxiety that most of us share.
But since the corona virus came into our lives, this dream has gone through some interesting incarnations and the strangest thing is that it has happened to many people, all over the world and in parallel.
Deirdre Barrett is a researcher and lecturer in psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Barrett is very much involved in the subject of dreams and since the outbreak of the plague she has decided to map people's dreams to understand how the new situation affects all of us in the subconscious.
Quite interestingly, she notices a recurring dream in many - they panic when they notice they don’t have a mask on hand - and it feels just like being naked.
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"I noticed that these 'mask dreams' gradually began to replace the 'public nudity' dreams that a lot of people talk about," she said.
"This dream actually reflects a classic social anxiety that lies somewhere on the embarrassment / shame continuum that drives most of our lives. As a dream researcher, I was immediately intrigued to find out what else our 'dream world' is trying to say about people's latent reactions to the new global disaster."
And people not only felt 'naked in public' without the mask.
The online survey published by Barrett drained no less than 15,000 reports from around the world.
People told, among other things, about the anger or fear they felt in the dream because of people who did not wear masks.
But according to Barrett, shame was the strongest emotion that arose from the subconscious of the surfers in this context.
Some of the people, she adds, had real nightmares associated with masks.
Afraid to get caught without a mask.
A man with a mask (Photo: GettyImages, Justin Setterfield)
"One participant said he dreamed of a world where people wear masks for so long - until they no longer have mouths. In this dream, people's masks were already fitted with the bottom of the face and they had to choose whether they wanted food to be injected directly into their trachea or through Infusion ".
When the epidemic was at its peak, in early 2020, the dreams of many were even more bizarre and mostly dealt with an immediate fear of infection, or pests in general - not just viruses but also non-microscopic creatures.
"I saw many dozens of testimonies of every insect imaginable that attacked people in dreams. There were also large swarms of all kinds of insects. Cockroach armies ran around in dreams, as well as large masses of worms. There were also crickets with vampire fangs, bedbugs, fleas. ".
An interesting gap between men and women
And if you thought that only masks and insects produce emotional vortices within the psyche, it turns out that there is another popular actor starring in our collective nightmares.
Many, according to the survey, are very afraid to return to routine.
"I've seen a lot of dreams that deal with fear of workplaces and schools - especially because it's an infectious and stressful environment," Barrett explains.
She said that in one dream, a woman returned to her workplace and discovered that there was a new law that required people to walk barefoot on a dirty, wet carpet for an entire day.
During the period of closures and restrictions, people also began to report dreams that reflected loneliness and alienation.
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This is not the first time Barrett has decided to examine how traumatic events affect dreams. Throughout history it has also interviewed American citizens after the events of September 11 and the Gulf War as well as Holocaust survivors who survived the Nazi concentration camps. The main goal of these studies, she says, is not only to understand how anxiety affects dreams - but also to find therapeutic tools that will help reduce this collective anxiety.
To improve diagnostic efforts, she used an artificial intelligence-based tool to analyze the evidence, in order to identify recurring emotions in many people. "In both men and women, fear-related dreams doubled compared to the days before the epidemic. My patient was three times as likely to have dreams and death four times as many," she said.
However, the difference between men and women is evident in the reflection of two very unpleasant emotions.
"The levels of anger and sadness reflected in the dreams were twice as high among women as in the days before the plague. In men, these feelings appeared at a similar rate before and after the outbreak of the plague."
Sadder and more angry.
A woman wakes up from a nightmare (Photo: Giphy)
So why is this happening?
Barrett estimates that many women employed part-time were fired during this period and were also required to bear more of the burden of raising children compared to men.
Women traditionally also tend to care more about hospital staff and even when frustrated with hospital staff, women tend to work more in less senior positions.
Therefore, they are often required to be the ones to deal with the more complex tasks associated with caring for patients.
Barrett added that "the fact that women generally feel sadder and more angry makes a lot of sense to me."
"Significant increase in optimistic dreams"
If until now we have managed to depress you - here is an interesting and surprising insight into our collective subconscious. According to Barrett, after the first vaccinations against the virus were approved, she noticed a "significant increase in dreams that convey optimism." In the first stage, people started dreaming that they are meeting family and friends. By the second stage, the clubs had already arrived, which for a long time felt like something we could really only dream of.
These dreams, the survey shows, were present in many even in 2020, but at that point, they mostly caused, well, sadness and anger. With the introduction of vaccines into our lives, they were also immersed in a lot of hope and anticipation.
And if you do not want to suffer from bad dreams at night, Barrett has some interesting tips that may help you enjoy the world of your imagination more.
According to her, a lot of people who do not want to experience nightmares at night, just try their best to avoid thinking about issues that cause nightmares before bed.
But as the "Pink Elephant" experiment in psychology illustrates - when you try not to think about a pink elephant - this is exactly what will resonate in your brain endlessly.
Instead, she suggests, try to focus on something positive before you go to bed.
"Try to produce a good mental picture before you fall asleep. If it helps, place a picture or other object in front of your eyes that reflects something you do want to dream about. Also documenting the dreams in a diary can greatly help understand your inner world, recognize your anxieties and overcome it at some point. About them. "
According to her, it will help not only produce better dreams - but also improve mental health when you are fully conscious.
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