Apparently, a lot of people have been having some pretty strange dreams during this pandemic. If you’re one of those people, these dreams might not be as out of place as you might think they are.
According to CNN, these odd dreams many of us are facing are basically normal responses to the things we’re facing. You see, the situation before us with this novel coronavirus is stressful and we’re not used to this kind of thing at all. The things our brains are taking in right now can manifest in some interesting ways.
Sleep medicine expert Dr. Mier Kryger told CNN as follows on the topic:
“This [pandemic] is something that they’ve never experienced before,”
“And it’s possible that their brains are trying to find a time when things weren’t like that. It’s like when sometimes people are trying to fall asleep and they can’t turn their minds off. They will try to think about a time when things were better.”
Actually, right now so many people are going through this that there is even a blog about it. This blog is called ‘I Dream of Covid’ and people from all over the world submit the dreams or perhaps for some nightmares they’ve been having. Now, if that doesn’t make the presence of these dreams known there is even a hashtag on Twitter about this ‘#pandemicdreams’.
USA Today wrote as follows on this topic:
Experts say dreams are a way for people to understand themselves. Their main function is to process emotions, which for many people have been more intense during the pandemic. People’s waking lives are fraught – fear, uncertainty and, helplessness pervade the day. Those same emotions make respite at night elusive.
“In our lives … we’re only consciously aware of about 2% of what’s going on around us and the other 98%, most of that is emotional, and we use our dreams as a way of understanding those emotions,” said Ian Wallace, a psychologist who specializes in dreams. “In a situation like this pandemic, where emotions are heightened, people’s awareness of their dreams are also heightened and these dreams might seem more vivid and more scary.”
One of the most universally common dreams, Wallace said, is one where a person is being chased. The dreamer may be pursuing something, or something is pursuing the dreamer. But the pandemic has put a twist on it.
“Just now, what people are dreaming of in these chase dreams is something faceless,” he said. “Something really hard to identify, something that’s unknown.”
Fear of the unknown is ubiquitous. People want to know when social distancing and quarantines will end. They want to know if they will get sick or if someone they love will. They want to know when the stimulus checks are coming, if they’ll have a job when this is over, what life will look like when people are encouraged to emerge again.
Uncertainty during the day, Wallace said, inevitably influences dreams at night.
“We use our dreams to resolve emotional tension and particularly emotional uncertainty because human beings are not very good at dealing with uncertainty,” he said.
Stress can impact us all in crazy ways and this is one of those crazy ways. Don’t think too much of your odd dreams right now and do work to de-stress more often during the day. In time all of this will be over with and we will all be able to get back to normal. For more on this topic please check out the video below.