Coronavirus anxiety could be causing your weird dreams


David Salkeld needs sleep. The 54-year-old registered nurse works up to 60 hours a week in a North Carolina emergency room, dubbed Camp COVID by the staff. But when the exhausted Salkeld

falls asleep after a grueling day, he often endures an unsettling dream. At his boyhood home, he opens a garage door and sees the ghosts of two tiny girls. They are his deceased daughters,

though Salkeld and his wife don't have daughters (they have two sons). He cries when he sees them. The girls are in color, but Salkeld is in black and white. He tries to touch them, but

they raise their hands and say that he can't. Eventually they disappear. “I start to cry harder because I don't know if I will ever see them again,” he says. Salkeld attributes

the dreams to work-related stress. But even if you're not on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, you may be experiencing and remembering distressing dreams. In a survey

commissioned by Kelly Bulkeley, director of the Sleep and Dream Database, nearly 30 percent of respondents said they had experienced an increase in dream recall. More than 2,500 respondents

have shared details of more than 6,000 pandemic dreams on a survey site launched by Deidre Barrett, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University. A group of London

psychoanalytic theory students are collecting dream recaps on lockdowndreams.com, and two Bay Area sisters are doing the same on idreamofcovid.com, where nearly 2,600 dream descriptions have

been posted not just by Americans, but from people in countries such Israel, Italy, Pakistan and Brazil. So yes, we're all dreaming more. But why? And does age affect your dreams?

COPING WITH STRESS The most obvious cause of disturbing dreams is pandemic-related anxiety. Humans process fear-related experiences through REM sleep and dreams, and invisible threats such

as COVID-19 can make dreams more bizarre, says Patrick McNamara, a professor of psychology at Northcentral University and the author of _The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams_. "We

don't know for sure why we use metaphors and bizarre images, but the general consensus is that it puts some parameters around ill-defined threats,” he says. In the dreams that Barrett

is collecting on the Harvard site, bugs are a common metaphor: People report dreams involving swarms of insects such as cockroaches and grasshoppers. Disasters such as tornadoes and

earthquakes are another frequent symbol. “We symbolize the threat in our dreams and try to work with it and integrate it into our conceptual system,” McNamara says. Stress may affect dreams

even if you don't feel stressed. Lynne Golodner, owner and chief creative officer for Your People LLC, a marketing and public relations firm in suburban Detroit, recently dreamt that

she was stuck in Iran and couldn't reach her children. The coronavirus dream themes seem obvious — lack of control, feeling trapped — yet Golodner says she's anxiety-free. “I like

the stay-at-home mandate and the simplicity it brings,” she says.