For millions of people around the world dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, sleep brings no relief.
Sleep medicine physician Dr. Thanuja Hamilton discusses why sleep is even more important right now and gives her recommendations on how to get a restful night’s sleep.The horrors of COVID-19, and the surreal and frightening ways it has upended daily life, are infecting dreams and exposing feelings of fear, loss, isolation and grief that transcend culture, language and national boundaries.
The psychological toll is staggering, particularly for health care workers whose dreams show similarities to those of combat veterans and 9/11 responders, said Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard University professor who is surveying COVID dreamers worldwide. She has collected 6,000 dream samples from about 2,400 people.
Dreams of a safe place suddenly overtaken by the virus speak to contagion's terrifying invisibility, says Cathy Caruth, a professor at Cornell University who has studied trauma for 30 years. Pandemic dreams, she says, are reminiscent of the experience of Hiroshima survivors, who worried about invisible radiation exposure, and also of some nightmares described by Vietnam veterans.
A few days later, she dreamed she and her girlfriend were in line to enter a dark, metal warehouse where they'd be injected with the new coronavirus by government workers wearing Hazmat suits. Fluorescent lights in the parking lot cast an eerie glow as she watched her partner get the shot and gasp for breath. Then she got the shot, too.
Rafiq is terrified for her elderly father, who insists on going to prayers every day despite a cough and a stay-at-home order. “I think,” she said in a Twitter direct message, “this anxiety has given me this dream.”
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