This is Your Brain on Coronavirus Dreams

During sleep, the brain cycles through different stages. Most dreaming, especially vivid dreaming, takes place during the REM (rapid-eye movement) sleep stage, which the brain first enters about 90 minutes into the night.

And as you sleep, each REM stage is longer than the last and evokes more intense eye movements, which may indicate more vivid dreams. “If you sleep four instead of eight hours, you’re not getting half of your dreaming time — you’re getting more like a fourth,” says Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School who’s been conducting a survey of dreams during the Covid-19 pandemic.

With many people staying at home with no nighttime activities, we’re likely to be sleeping more and getting more REM sleep, allowing vivid dreams to take place. Waking up during the other stages of sleep — thanks to alarm clocks and the sleep deprivation of life as usual — you’re less likely to remember dreams so clearly. “An eight-hour sleeper has about five dreams a night and forgets most of them,” Barrett says.

With no commute in the morning, we’re also more likely to wake up during REM sleep, allowing us to remember those dreams better. “For so many people, their conditions of awakening have radically changed” says Kelly Bulkeley, a psychologist who runs the Sleep and Dream Database. “A lot of people aren’t springing out of bed, taking a shower, running out the door,” he says. “That inevitably increases dream recall and the ability to remember those intense dreams.”

As for the content of people’s dreams, Bulkeley speculates that social distancing and the surreality of the current crisis play a key role. “To the extent that there’s some evolutionary function for dreaming, that it contributes to survival, this is the time we should be dreaming a lot, and they should be vivid,” he says. “One of the strongest signals of waking/dreaming continuity are our social relationships. The fact our social life is turned around by this crisis, we’d expect to see far more vivid dreams.”

The craving for social activity — or the fear of it — was front and center in many of the dreams I heard. One friend described a dream in which she journeyed from crowded coffee shop to coffee shop, looking for the one with the shortest line. Only upon waking up did she think how odd it was to be around so many people. Another friend told me she dreamed of going out to dinner with friends and realized mid-dream that they were putting people in danger. Yet another told me of driving home some unwanted party guests who had refused to leave even though they were violating social distancing. In the dream, the party guests attacked him.

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