Pandemic dreams: what 2020 taught dream researchers

In the spring of 2020, something unusual happened to dream research. Dreams are normally studied one sleeper at a time. Suddenly, much of the world was living through the same stress at the same moment, and a great many people were saying the same thing: their dreams had become stranger, more vivid and more frightening. Researchers moved quickly to collect them.

Finland: a map of lockdown dreams

In Finland, Anu-Katriina Pesonen and colleagues invited readers of the country’s most widely read newspaper to an online survey in the sixth week of lockdown. Over one week, 4,275 people described their sleep and 811 shared what they had dreamed. Compared with before the pandemic, 54.2% said they were sleeping more, 28.6% reported more awakenings and 26.0% reported more nightmares.^[1]

The team then used computer analysis to map which words appeared together in the dream reports. They found 33 clusters of dreams, 20 of them bad dreams, and more than half of the bad-dream clusters were specific to the pandemic, with labels such as “Disregard of Distancing”, “Elderly in Trouble” and “Disease Management”. The patterns were more pronounced in people who reported more stress.^[1]

The United States: who was hit hardest

In early May 2020, Michael Schredl and Kelly Bulkeley surveyed 3,031 adults in the United States. Those whose lives were most affected by the pandemic reported the largest changes in their dreams: more dream recall, more negative dreams and more dreams about the pandemic itself. The effects were more marked in women and in people with more years of education.^[3]

Women’s dreams changed most

Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School, gathered pandemic dreams from 2,888 people through an online survey in the first months of the pandemic, and compared them with dreams collected before it, using software that counts words in emotional and other categories. Women’s pandemic dreams contained fewer positive emotions and more anxiety, sadness and anger, and more references to the body, health and death. Men’s dreams shifted in the same direction, but less.^[2]

In her book Pandemic Dreams, Barrett described recurring images, from bug attacks to invisible monsters, and suggested they reflected a threat that was harder to see than the other crises she had studied.^[6]

Across four continents

The International COVID-19 Sleep Study, a collaboration of sleep researchers, ran a shared online survey of 19,355 adults in 14 countries from May to July 2020. More people reported high dream recall, on three or more nights a week, during the pandemic than before it. High recall was linked with being a woman, with nightmares, with trouble staying asleep and with symptoms of post-traumatic stress.^[4]

A later round of the same collaboration, from May to November 2021, surveyed 15,854 adults in 16 countries. Frequent nightmares, at least once a week, were reported by 11.0% for 2021, compared with 6.9% for 2019.^[5] The 2019 figures were recalled from 2021, so they are estimates. We look at this study in more detail in one in nine adults reported weekly nightmares in 2021.

What the surveys cannot tell us

• Self-report. Almost everything here comes from people describing their own sleep and dreams, often from memory.
• Who chooses to answer. People who respond to a newspaper call or a dream survey may be those whose dreams changed most. The Finnish team noted that their recruitment may have drawn people with sleep problems or fresh pandemic dreams.^[1]
• “Before” was often remembered, not measured. Comparisons with pre-pandemic sleep usually relied on recall.^[5]
• Correlation, not cause. Stress and bad dreams travelled together, but surveys cannot show which drove which, and many things changed at once: sleep timing, routines, isolation, worry.

What shared stress teaches about dreams

Even with those limits, the pandemic offered something close to a natural experiment, and the results fit what researchers call the continuity hypothesis: dreams tend to carry the concerns and feelings of waking life.^[2] A few lessons stand out.

• Dreams follow feelings, not headlines. Many pandemic dreams were less about the virus itself than about crowds, distance, cancelled plans and people in danger: the emotional shape of the time.^[1]
• Sleep patterns matter too. Many people slept longer and woke more often, and dreams are remembered mainly when we wake during or just after them. Why nightmares cluster at 3 a.m. explains why.
• A run of bad dreams in a hard time is understandable. It is a common response to stress, not a sign that something is wrong with you, and dreams do not predict what will happen.
• Persistent nightmares deserve attention. If bad dreams continue after the stress has eased, disturb your sleep or make you dread bedtime, they are worth treating. Read about nightmare disorder, or start with our guide to stopping nightmares.

If you are going through a stretch like that now, a short, calm routine before bed and a plan for the small hours can help. That is what Baku’s free Nightlight is for.