I had a very weird dream last night ...
Dreams have definitely not been pleasant
I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping...
If your dreams have become very strange during lockdown...
You're not alone....
Our lockdowns may be different,
But our strange dreams are pretty universal.
If I were to explain my sleeping experience during the quarantine in a word I'd say "wack"
Or - crazy.
Certainly there's a lot more anxiety in these dreams.
Dr Deirdre Barrett is conducting a coronavirus dream survey.
She's studied over 4,000 dreams so far, mainly from the US and Canada, as well as from across Europe.
I'm seeing a lot of dreams that are
about the virus itself.
Dreams where the person
gets the virus and either is desperately trying to get into a hospital and can't, or they just sort of are having trouble breathing
and gradually, you know, about to die.
A lot of dreams where their children have it. A lot of Dreams were their elderly parents have it.
In the dream, everything was back to normal and cities lockdowns were over.
And in the place, I saw a group of people who were wearing health masks and health equipments.
With each step their fear grew stronger.
It took me no time to understand that they were not fearing of any disease -
but they were fearing of me, and it really felt so weird.
I've also seen metaphors for the virus:
huge piles of
white worms.
Grasshoppers attacking someone.
Flying bugs, crawling bugs, in one it's sort of every kind of bug in the world.
When the threat is kind of invisible
You get a lot more metaphors.
My dreams definitely have changed.
I mean, I definitely don't remember the entire extent, but I used to have fewer dreams
When everything was normal.
For some of us, lockdown is causing sleep havoc...
1. A big life change
There's research that shows that
life stress or life change tends to increase our recall of dreaming for a while.
2. More sleep = more dreams
The population is chronically sleep-deprived and
except for health care workers. Most of us now have more time to sleep
So people are doing big catch ups with long REM cycles now. And I think that's a big part of it.
Also there's this thing called REM density.
Later in the night our our last sleep cycles if we sleep long enough
have more REM density which just means the eye movements are
faster and more intense, but that correlates with dream vividness also.
It kind of feels like time is an illusion and that it doesn't matter.
Morning for me would be around 12 noon to 4 o'clock p.m. And
I'd only go to bed and finally fall asleep at 5am.
I stay up for more than 20 hours and then I sleep for another four/five hours and then I get up again.
The anxiety of the situation is
definitely impacting my sleep schedule.
How can we all get a better night's sleep
If you're having insomnia, it's good to get as much exercise as possible.
And even for people who used to running outside and are in a neighbourhood or country that that's
not as possible in, there are plenty of vigorous things you can do in your home.
I've been trying to clean the house every day and
I try to get tired so that I can sleep on time.
At bedtime, just doing whatever is the most relaxing,
except hot baths are not good for sleep.
TV shows that are relaxing. Not watching Contagion as the last thing before you fall asleep.
Some people really enjoy doing some kind of formal relaxation exercise.
And if you're having trouble falling asleep, ending your screen viewing earlier than usual is helpful.