How COVID-19 Changed Dreaming for Many

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, a number of people noted that their dream experience was changing, which seems a bit odd.

For humans, sleep often serves as a period of recharging, a reprieve from the daily stressors and worries of life. But for many, sleep also results in dreams, whether they’re the classics about falling endlessly or showing up at school in only your underwear, or something more sinister, closer to a horrifying nightmare. And some dreams are just plain strange.

While many of their dreams had been fairly short, muted, and normal, with the pandemic and the many alterations of daily life it brought, dreams became longer, more vivid, and overall, more absurd. Neuroscientists and psychologists were intrigued by this odd development and dove deeper into why so many people were having scary, more frequent, and just plain strange dreams.

Stress Takes Its Toll

For many, the coronavirus pandemic resulted in stressful changes: the loss of a job, or perhaps additional pressures and hours at work, for healthcare workers and essential employees, teaching children at home, living with an at-risk family member, as well as worrying about COVID-19 and its possible health effects. All of these and more caused a lot of anxiety and stress for people across the country, and this factored into their sleep.

Neurologists and other specialists explained that the brain typically processes intense emotions like fear and worry during the REM part of our sleep cycle, which is also the part of the cycle when dreams happen. The emotions are processed by the brain and simulated in the form of nightmares, but if the emotions are more intense, they take longer to process, therefore resulting in dreams that are more frequent and more vivid. Stress, fear, and other less-than-desirable emotions that have been felt more often due to the coronavirus pandemic manifest themselves into dreams, causing dreams to become more unnerving.

Why Are We Dreaming More?

One of the reasons it appears people are dreaming more is very simple: a lot of people are sleeping more. Of course, there are some who are getting less sleep, whether it is because they are working more as essential employees, or because they’re up late binging Netflix, but many people, with less work to do and hardly anywhere to go, are sleeping more, and sleeping longer. Longer stretches of sleep allow for more REM cycles, and in turn, more opportunities for dreams.

Another possibility is that we aren’t dreaming more, but that we’re remembering the dreams more frequently than we were before COVID-19. Often, people wake up with the feeling that they’ve had a dream, but they aren’t able to recall anything about it. Psychologists and others who study the brain say that in order to remember a dream, you must wake up in the middle of it. Those who have been finding it harder to stay asleep since the pandemic began and are experiencing restlessness while they sleep may be remembering dreams more frequently and vividly.

How to Gain Control of Your Sleep

Now that you understand why COVID-19 has changed your sleep patterns, what can you do about it? Nightmares and night terrors are extremely disrupting and disheartening, but there are a couple of things you can do to get them better under control and get a better night’s rest.

Any method of controlling and reducing stress before you to bed, such as yoga, meditation, soothing music, or warm baths, will likely reduce nightmares. Rewriting the endings or changing aspects of terrifying or strange dreams is a strategy that has been recommended by many experts. For example, if a person has a dream about opening a door and encountering a horrifying entity, they can create a new ending for the nightmare, where instead of a monster lurking behind the door, their best friend was waiting with a cake. It sounds somewhat silly, but the method has proven effective in several studies.

The brain can be easily manipulated, and painting aspects of a night terror in a more positive light can make the dream seem not as bad. COVID-19 changed a lot about our lives, including the way we sleep and dream. Increased levels of stress mean that emotions are taking longer to process, and dreams are becoming more intense, vivid, and frequent. However, even with these new developments, there are still ways to reduce emotions like fear and anxiety and get a good night’s sleep.