Even our nightmares may help us adjust to our new reality
Photo: Getty Images/sdominick The coronavirus pandemic has upended nearly every aspect of our waking lives — our routines, our job security, our hopes for the future. Days are suffused with fear for our health and our loved ones. Checking the news — seeing dystopic images of empty cities and graphs of crashing markets, learning the latest death toll — is as sweat-inducing as going to the gym used to be.
Barrett suggested that the spike in dream recall is a side effect of the slower-paced lifestyle some non-essential workers are now leading. “Changing one’s routine dramatically often leads to more dream recall,” she says. Especially when the new routine involves more sleep.
The majority of my own pandemic dreams have been mundane, mirroring my diminished creative capacity and my new, boring fixations: grocery lists, cooking, the twitchy backdrop of social media. I dreamed that I added too much broth to a stew; that I had 73 notifications on Twitter; that I discovered several bananas in the kitchen. Some were ripe, some green. “Wow,” I thought. “Bananas.
Some of our anxiety dreams may serve a purpose beyond rehashing our worry-filled days. Learning a new skill often leads to a flood of dreams, which in turn reinforce the lessons. In one study, people enrolled in a French-language intensive remembered more dreams, and even had an increase in REM sleep, during the program than before or after it.
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