Story at a glance
- An increasing amount of people during the pandemic have reported experiencing more vivid or bizarre dreams.
- One possible reason for the changes in dreams is because of disrupted sleep patterns caused by lockdown.
- Relaxed schedules and more sleep time might be causing the increase in vivid dreams.
Across the globe, people reported having more vivid or strange dreams during the pandemic, according to Scientific American.
Changes in dreaming have been reported to occur after other mass-scale traumatic events like the Sept. 11 attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 and after the San Francisco earthquake in 1989, according to the publication.
But never has such a global change in dreams been documented like during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the change is prompting people to seek out an answer to long-standing questions: Why do you dream at all, and do the dreams mean anything?
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One theory is that dreams are the mind’s way of storing important memories and getting rid of unimportant ones, as well as a way of sifting through complex thoughts and feelings, according to Healthline.
Dream interpretation, at least in the West, historically has not really been a part of mainstream culture, in part due to backlash against Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, according to The Guardian.
“For Freud, dreams betrayed our socially unacceptable desires and sexual impulses from infancy,” Professor of Psychology at the University of Monreal Antonia Zadra told the publication. “In rejecting Freud, society also rejected the notion of paying much attention to our dreams and their content.”
According to The Guardian, more people are looking for answers to those questions via social media or online dream-sharing forums like DreamsCloud, DreamBoard and Awoken. Some therapists are even offering some “dream-sharing retreats” in group work, according to the outlet.
Jason DeBord, a moderator for a dream interpretation forum on reddit called RadOwl and one of the “dreamworkers” experiencing a boom in business, told The Guardian that it’s been a hectic time for dreamers and those interpreting the dreams throughout the pandemic.
“It’s been a busy time for people both having and remembering strange dreams, and also thinking about these dreams and what they might mean,” DeBord told The Guardian.
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