Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated stressors have impacted the daily lives and sleeping patterns of many individuals, including university students. Dreams may provide insight into how the mind processes changing realities; dreams not only allow consolidation of new information, but may give the opportunity to creatively “play out” low-risk, hypothetical threat simulations. While there are studies that analyze dreams in high-stress situations, little is known of how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted dreams of university students. The aim of this study was to explore how the dream content of students was affected during the university COVID-19 lockdown period (March–July, 2020). Using online survey methods, we analyzed dream recall content (n = 71) using the Hall-Van de Castle dream coding system and Fisher's exact tests for sex comparisons. Preliminary results indicate that female students experienced more nightmares as compared to male students. Dream analysis found that, relative to normative American College Student (ACS) samples generated pre-COVID-19, women were more likely to experience aggressive interactions in their dream content, including increased physical aggression. Results indicate that university students did experience changes in dream content due to the pandemic lockdown period, with women disproportionally affected. These findings can aid universities in developing support programs for students by bringing forth an understanding of students' concerns and anxieties as they process the “new normal” of social distancing.
Highlights
On March 16, 2020, the University of Toronto stopped in-person classes at its three campuses in response to the World Health Organization’s classification of COVID-19 as a pandemic (University of Toronto News, 2020)
One dream recollection was not included in the HvDC analysis due to sex-based requirements of the coding system, their general responses were retained for descriptive statistics
Relative to the control group, dreams experienced by females (n = 51) during COVID-19 were significantly more likely to be aggressive rather than friendly (h = +0.45, p = 0.008, p < 0.01), were more likely to be the recipients of aggressive interactions than the initiators (h = −0.51, p = 0.015, p < 0.05), and were more likely to experience physical aggression than verbal aggression (h = +0.64, p = 0.001, p < 0.01)
Summary
On March 16, 2020, the University of Toronto stopped in-person classes at its three campuses in response to the World Health Organization’s classification of COVID-19 as a pandemic (University of Toronto News, 2020). Intended to last only 2 weeks, the closure of many campus services continued through the winter semester and into the summer, with all classes delivered online During this time, social distancing protocols were enforced in the City of Toronto, leading to the closure of municipal public spaces, including libraries, restaurants, and public recreation and fitness centers (City of Toronto, 2020a). A study by Statistics Canada from April 19th to May 1st, 2020 reported that almost 50% of post-secondary students had lost their jobs, while 68% were extremely concerned about depleting their personal savings (Statistics Canada, 2020) This unprecedented large-scale lockdown presented an opportunity to understand how social isolation and stress may impact dream content
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