Epidemic dreams: dreaming about health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The continuity hypothesis of dreams suggests that the content of dreams is continuous with the dreamer's waking experiences. Given the unprecedented nature of the experiences during COVID-19, we studied the continuity hypothesis in the context of the pandemic. We implemented a deep-learning algorithm that can extract mentions of medical conditions from text and applied it to two datasets collected during the pandemic: 2888 dream reports (dreaming life experiences), and 57 milion tweets (waking life experiences) mentioning the pandemic. The health expressions common to both sets were typical COVID-19 symptoms (e.g. cough, fever and anxiety), suggesting that dreams reflected people's real-world experiences. The health expressions that distinguished the two sets reflected differences in thought processes: expressions in waking life reflected a linear and logical thought process and, as such, described realistic symptoms or related disorders (e.g. nasal pain, SARS, H1N1); those in dreaming life reflected a thought process closer to the visual and emotional spheres and, as such, described either conditions unrelated to the virus (e.g. maggots, deformities, snake bites), or conditions of surreal nature (e.g. teeth falling out, body crumbling into sand). Our results confirm that dream reports represent an understudied yet valuable source of people's health experiences in the real world.

Dreams About COVID-19 Versus Normative Dreams: Trends by Gender

Dreams about the COVID-19 pandemic were collected from 2,888 dreamers via an online survey and compared to normative dreams from an earlier period. A total of 9 categories of emotions and body concerns from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) were utilized. As predicted by the continuity hypothesis of dreaming, women showed significantly lower positive emotions in their dreams and higher rates of negative emotions, anxiety, sadness, anger, body content, references to biological processes, health, and death. For male respondents, the predicted higher score for the LIWC variable health was the only one significant at as high a level as for women. LIWC positive emotions, negative emotions, anxiety, and death were elevated in the predicted direction at lower significance levels than the effects for women. The variables anger, sadness, and body did not differ for men between the pandemic dreams and the normative sample. Results are discussed in terms of the continuity hypothesis both for distress and specific concerns of both groups and in light of the higher rate of many stressors for women versus men during the pandemic.