With all this quarantine happening, our lives slowed down which opened up our imagination. Therefore, many people are experiencing vivid and intense dreams and nightmares almost every night.
If you thought you are the only one having weird dreams, you are not alone. You can now check the Twitter account @quarandreams and read the other people’s recent dreams from all over the world. They differ from totally mundane and normal to extremely weird, even mental.
For instance, one user wrote: ‘Had a dream I was in Russia at a penthouse looking down at a hologram of Jimmy Neutron that kept expanding.’
But, most dreams are usually about the coronavirus and connected with the situation we live in. For example, another user wrote: ‘Last night I dreamt I had to go to the store and nobody there believed in social distancing and everyone kept getting real close and touching me and the only way out was punch people in the face and fight my way out.’
Deirdre Leigh Barrett, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School’s psychiatry department and author of The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Their Dreams for Creative Problem Solving – and How You Can Too, is currently working on conducting a survey about dreams. She noted that there are healthcare professionals who are having even more extreme nightmares.
Moreover, Robert Bosnak, a psychoanalyst and former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams says that people are dreaming everywhere: ‘I’m working currently in the US, Australia, India, China, and Japan. Story is the same everywhere. People are dreaming up a storm.’
In his study he found that dreams we tend to remember left an impression on us because they were either bizarre, vivid, or emotionally loaded. Moreover, he discovered that they are connected to the hippocampus and the amygdala of the brain which are known as the limbic system that governs rage and dread. And during these stressful times, this is completely understandable.
The online psychotherapist Martha Crawford started to gather reports of people’s dreams in correlation to Donald Trump’s presidency.
“We’re dealing with a very intense cluster of very primal, existential anxieties right now — fear of loss of loved ones, fear of our own potential death, fear of suffering, fear of watching other people suffer, loss of contact with people we love.
We’re trying to keep our lid on and contain ourselves during the day and so at night, [dreaming] is the way we release that repression mechanism and start processing how we are making sense of these things,” she explains.
What kind of dreams are you having?
