By Rowan Hooper
Julia Lockheart, DreamsID.com
If you feel you’ve been dreaming a lot more recently, the coronavirus crisis and lockdown measures could be to blame. Changes in sleep patterns may mean many of us are dreaming more or remembering more of the dreams that we have, while the looming threat of the virus may have affected the nature of the dreams themselves.
According to a survey conducted by King’s College London, 62 per cent of people in the UK are getting just as much sleep, if not more, than before stricter social distancing measures began on 23 March. Similar patterns are likely in other countries, and it’s reasonable to assume that for some of those staying home, the time saved from getting ready for work and commuting is being used to get more sleep.
This means dream time and dream recall is probably increasing during the crisis, says Mark Blagrove, a psychologist at the Swansea University, UK.
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When you sleep for longer, you have more rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. This is the sleep stage from which most dreams are recalled. Modern life, however, typically involves shortened sleep and may be leading to an “epidemic” of dream loss.
But that may now be changing for some. “Lack of work schedules may be allowing individuals to wake up without an alarm clock,” says Blagrove. “Natural wake ups are known to result in longer dreams.”
At the same time, anxiety can disrupt our sleep, leading to more awakenings. When you awaken out of REM sleep, you’re much more likely to remember the dream you were having.
Overnight therapy
The content and tone of our dreams is also probably being affected. “Our dreams are more likely to incorporate memories from recent waking life that are emotional,” says Blagrove.
“Dreams are thought to be the brain’s way of working out our emotional problems, and the more anxious we become the more vivid the dream images become,” says Russell Foster, a circadian neuroscientist at the University of Oxford. “After 9/11, many New Yorkers reported dreams of being overwhelmed by a tidal wave or being attacked and robbed.”
Blagrove’s research supports this idea that the function of dreams is to process our emotions and memories, acting in effect as overnight therapy.
Another theory is that dreams also help prepare us for adversity. “The threat simulation theory predicts that when we are facing threats and feel fear and anxiety, our dream production mechanism starts simulating those fears and worries in our dreams,” says Katja Valli, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Turku, Finland.
Blagrove’s work suggests that talking about your dreams can alleviate distress, and lead to greater empathy and social bonding. He recently set up an online dream discussion forum for health workers.
One of the first to share their dreams in the forum was Libby Nolan, a nurse in Swansea who contracted the coronavirus and started getting nightmares while she was in quarantine. Graduate students at University College London have started a similar forum for sharing, lockdowndreams.com.
Bin the alarm
The evidence suggests, no doubt to the chagrin of people used to hearing endless meandering dreams from their children or partners, that it is good to talk about your dreams.
“Don’t worry about your dreams,” says Foster. “Take comfort in the fact that your brain is doing what it should be doing.”
Start a dream journal if you like, but we don’t know whether remembering the dreams themselves is necessary to get the benefit of REM sleep, says Els van der Helm of sleep consultancy Shleep, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Van der Helm points out that some studies suggest that women may have intense, recurring dreams more often than men, but there hasn’t been much research into this possible sex difference.
The important thing, says van der Helm, is to not set an alarm in the morning, so as not to cut short your REM sleep.
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