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(CNN) -
If you thought that living the pandemic was a nightmare while awake, imagine what it has been like in your dreams.
Many of us experience vivid and terrifying nightmares during the worst of the pandemic.
Depending on our level of trauma - the loss of a loved one or being a front-line healthcare worker in intensive care units packed with COVID-19 cases - the nightmares could be excruciating.
Psychologist Deirdre Barrett has been collecting dreams and nightmares since the virus brought our lives to a standstill.
Many of the nightmares revolved around the fear of death, as the subconscious meditated on the real threat of covid-19.
Other dreams presented the virus as an invading predator, often an insect.
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"There were grasshoppers with vampire fangs, lots of writhing worms, swarms of flying critters that could be bees, flies, or wasps, and armies of cockroaches that pounced on the dreamer," explains Barrett, associate professor of psychology at the College. Harvard Medical School, author and editor of numerous books on dreams, including Pandemic Dreams.
Barrett found that women were especially affected.
A dreamer entered "a morgue where, little by little, she discovers that live covid patients are being embalmed," Barrett wrote in an article published on the subject.
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Change of dreams when vaccinations started
Barrett continues to follow the dreams of the pandemic.
It has collected, from at least 76 countries, more than 14,000 dreams, two-thirds of which are from the United States.
In his ongoing analysis of the data, he has observed a change in the content of dreams since vaccinations and state and local community reopens began.
CNN spoke with her about the types of nightmares during the pandemic and how they have evolved over time.
The conversation was edited slightly for clarity.
ANALYSIS |
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CNN: How can dreams give us insight into our lives during the pandemic?
Deirdre Barrett
: Dreaming is just thinking in a really different brain state.
There is a lot of research on what is called the Dream Consistency Hypothesis, which has been extensively tested: the more someone thinks about certain topics during the day, the more they will appear in their dreams at night.
But in the brain state we find ourselves in during sleep, the visual areas are highly active, the storytelling areas are active, and the emotional areas are active, while the verbal and logic areas are less active than usual.
We are thinking about all our usual thoughts and concerns, but we do so in a very vivid, visual, narrative, or storytelling way.
Dreams may be more emotional and less logical, but the essential content is still very similar.
CNN: Why did you start collecting dreams during the pandemic?
Barrett
: In addition to my work on dreams and how they contribute to creativity and objective problem solving, I have done several studies on dreams during crisis or trauma.
I did a study on dreams after 9/11 and on dreams in Kuwait during the first Gulf War, both during the occupation and soon after.
And I came across a file of 500 POW dreams in a Nazi POW camp in WWII that no one had ever examined.
I thought it would be interesting to see how dreams during the pandemic resembled past crises.
I put out a global poll on March 23, 2020, and there were some nightmares that I saw early on in other parts of the world that only appeared in America later.
For example, in Italy, where the virus hit early and hard, health professionals had these classic post-traumatic dreams in which someone died in front of them, and they thought it was their responsibility to save them and they couldn't.
I didn't see any of those in the US for another two to three weeks, when the cases in New York City started to increase.
Dreams like "Oops, I don't have the mask on" or "The others don't wear the mask and I'm in danger" I saw them in Asia right at the beginning, but they didn't start in the United States until health professionals told us to start wearing masks.
I saw very similar dreams around the world, but for the most part the fact coincided with the time when the covid-19 outbreaks were worst in that region or when the guidelines for the public changed.
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CNN: How did our dreams change this year compared to 2020?
Barrett
: As the world started to open up, there have been some pretty big changes in the proportion of dreams that people are reporting.
To begin with, I began to see more positive and optimistic dreams.
These optimistic dreams tend to be about being back in some big, busy social situation doing a favorite activity, like dancing at a nightclub or being at a sporting event or being in a family reunion with many family members who actually live all over the world. country.
Dreams of this type were quite rare in the first weeks of the pandemic, and when people dreamed like this they used to comment that they woke up and felt a wave of sadness.
They felt as if the dream had mocked them with something they could no longer do, as if they were seeing something from their past that would not be in their near future.
But starting in mid-December 2020, when the vaccines were announced to be highly effective and approved for emergency use, positive dreams began to rise.
It was also very striking that the dream could be the same as in the first months of the pandemic, but now people said that they had woken up happy.
The dream had encouraged them because they felt that their dream augured a future in which everything would go well.
CNN: In your article, you mention that women had the worst of nightmares during the pandemic. Why?
Barrett
: When I started studying dreams during the pandemic, I predicted an increase in negative emotions and references to illness, death, and the physical body.
I compared the dream data I obtained with a huge set of dreams that had been collected during a lull before the pandemic.
What I discovered was that in both men's and women's dreams about the pandemic there were two and a half times more anxiety, twice as many references to the disease, and four times more references to death than in dreams captured before the death. pandemic.
But only in the case of women were other negative emotions elevated, such as sadness and anger.
They were almost double for women, but men's dreams showed no more anger or sadness than before.
I was a bit surprised when I got that result, but when I read the dreams more closely I discovered that the bad dreams about homeschooling were almost all from mothers, rather than from fathers, and that there were many female dreams about caring for children. children or how to care for the sick.
Another category that rose one and a half times in women was mentions of parts of the body, such as fingers, arms, toes, feet, torso of the legs, breasts and genitals .
I thought this would be related to the disease, but often the dream was "the housemate is looking at this or that part of the body".
And I realized that there has been an increase in reports of domestic abuse and sexual violence in the home during the pandemic and an increase in unwanted sexual approaches by roommates.
So it seemed that the dreams reflected problems that could be exclusive or experienced more frequently by women.
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CNN: Do the reported dream themes continue during the pandemic?
Barrett
: People keep dreaming about masks, it's a commonly reported dream, but there is a subtle change.
In the early days, it was always a fearful dream.
"I forgot my mask", "I dropped my mask" or "My mask is disintegrating in some magical way" - those were about half of all mask dreams.
The other half were: "I am around other people who do not have a mask", "They do not wear it properly" or "Their mask has holes".
In those first dreams of masks, the dreamer panicked and made an effort to get away from people because he was afraid of catching Covid-19.
Fear was definitely the main emotion.
However, early last fall, instead of fear and contagion being the problem when the dreamer realized he was not wearing a mask, it was shame or social modesty or "What will people think of me? for not wearing one? "
That falls into a more traditional dream metaphor for social shame, when people are in a shopping mall and suddenly realize they forgot their clothes.
It seems to me that these mask dreams temporarily replaced the dream of "naked in public" that many people have.
It's a really interesting change, and I'll be curious to see how long it lasts.
CNN: Based on your knowledge of trauma and nightmares, what do you hope will happen to pandemic dreams?
Barrett
: What we know is that when people experience the same traumatic event, many will dream of it shortly after it occurs.
Then, if the group mean is observed, it decreases over time and dreams about the event disappear for more than half of the people.
Doctors do not diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for some time, and having an elevated startle response or daytime memories or nightmares is not considered a disorder if they occur immediately afterward.
It is a very normal post-traumatic response to have nightmares about the event for a while, and then most people adjust.
However, some people will continue to struggle and possibly develop long-term traumatic dreams, such as those most directly affected by the event who have suffered severe trauma.
This group also includes people who already have anxiety disorders and those who have suffered previous trauma in their history.
After 9/11, the people who had the worst nightmares were those in the building who could barely get out, the first responders, and the people who worked close enough to see scenes of bodies falling.
Many of the worst nightmares I have received during the pandemic are from nurses and doctors on the front lines.
CNN: Who will have a longer fight against pandemic nightmares?
Barrett
: Other people can develop long-lasting trauma dreams, such as people who were abused in their childhood, women who have been raped, and war veterans.
This occurs even in people who have not continued to have recurring nightmares about the previous trauma.
A new trauma, even one that is experienced in a secondary way, appears and receives a lot of news attention and that can activate dreams about the previous or recent trauma, or even a hybrid of both traumas in the same nightmare.
I would say that it is the people who have had the most direct experience with death and agony, those who are physiologically vulnerable to anxiety, stress, and trauma, and those who have had previous trauma who are likely to have a longer struggle. with nightmares.
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