Abstract
We used crowdsourcing (CS) to examine how COVID-19 lockdown affects the content of dreams and nightmares. The CS took place on the sixth week of the lockdown. Over the course of 1 week, 4,275 respondents (mean age 43, SD = 14 years) assessed their sleep, and 811 reported their dream content. Overall, respondents slept substantially more (54.2%) but reported an average increase of awakenings (28.6%) and nightmares (26%) from the pre-pandemic situation. We transcribed the content of the dreams into word lists and performed unsupervised computational network and cluster analysis of word associations, which suggested 33 dream clusters including 20 bad dream clusters, of which 55% were pandemic-specific (e.g., Disease Management, Disregard of Distancing, Elderly in Trouble). The dream-association networks were more accentuated for those who reported an increase in perceived stress. This CS survey on dream-association networks and pandemic stress introduces novel, collectively shared COVID-19 bad dream contents.
Highlights
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 is a pandemic (World Health Organization, 2020)
We explored sleep patterns and pandemic dream content during the sixth week of the lockdown
Instead of traditional a priori–defined thematic content analysis of dreams, we used a computational exploratory, unsupervised network analysis in which single words were associated to create a network of dream content (Pons and Latapy, 2005)
Summary
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 is a pandemic (World Health Organization, 2020). An increase in nightmares has been previously observed with regard to wars, terrorist attacks, and during earlier pandemics or infectious diseases (Nielsen et al, 2006; Hartmann and Brezler, 2008; Sandman et al, 2013). Preliminary reports suggest that poor-quality sleep and insomnia-related symptoms have increased in COVID Dreams the general population (Casagrande et al, 2020; Huang and Zhao, 2020; Xiao et al, 2020); the impact of the pandemic on the content of dreams and nightmares remains unexplored. Seizing on the opportunity and collecting dream content during a carefully selected time window during the COVID-19 lockdown allowed for a unique natural experiment to study dreams and nightmares
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