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Avoid repeating your worst fears nightly with a cooler bedroom, warm bath, and thinking about your favorite person before bed.
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Pandemic dreams are driving us all crazy. Photo by Getty
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The pandemic may be slowly drawing to a compassionate end, but for some, the fear-related nightmares won’t turn black anytime soon.
The persistent existential threat posed by the virus has meant that large parts of the population have difficulty coping with previously unseen stresses which – together with the resulting changes in sleep patterns – can cause disruptive “quarantine dreams”.
“This is something we have seen in other traumatic events around the world and in our country,” said Raj Dasgupta, sleep specialist and assistant professor of clinical medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California CNN. “The fact that we have more nightmares during this pandemic doesn’t surprise me.”
The turmoil began a little over a year ago when waves of lockdowns released many from the monotony of their daily commuting, leaving them ready and able to stay up later than they otherwise could. The longer you sleep, the more likely it is that you will experience deeper levels of REM sleep. This is the time the brain uses to process and store memories from the day before.
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It has also led to some really strange dreams, said Deidre Barrett, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who designed a quiz to get a better sense of how the pandemic is pestering people after hours. “There are armies of cockroaches that run on the dreamer,” she said. “There are masses of wriggling worms; there were some locusts with vampire teeth; There are bed bugs, stink bugs. “
Metaphors for the pandemic are hard to miss, she said, causing massive devastation in the form of tornadoes and tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes – and – unsurprisingly given the source – the arrival of mass shooters. Other nightmares focused on feeling trapped or trapped in public without a mask and couldn’t avoid other people’s constant coughing.
Some were much, much worse. “There was a woman who was actually homeschooling her child, but she dreamed that someone had decided that her child’s entire class had to come and live with her,” said Barret. “People who seek refuge at home alone will dream of being locked up in jail, or a woman was sent to Mars alone to start the first one-person Mars colony.”
Another common topic was the terrible inability to help a loved one overcome the crisis. “They usually take care of someone dying of COVID-19 and try to connect a patient to a ventilator or reattach the tubing that was disconnected from a ventilator, or the respirators won’t work,” Barrett said. They feel that it is their responsibility to save that person’s life and yet they don’t have much control over it and the person dies anyway. This is their nightmare. It is the worst moment of their daily experience. “
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Even as the world moves out of the pandemic, frontline workers and patients lucky enough to check out of the hospital are likely to face PTSD-like symptoms in the years to come.
“I’m an intensive care doctor,” said Dasgupta. “The patients are not on the ventilator for days – we often speak of weeks to months. They’re on medication, they’re lonely, it’s scary, so naturally they have post-traumatic stress nightmares. “
To avoid repeating some of your worst fears nightly, Rebecca Robbins, an associate researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who studies sleep, recommends lowering the temperature before turning off the lights. “We did this experimentally with electric blankets,” she said. “When we put electric blankets on people while they sleep, we find that dreams are more frightening, a little bit more in the nightmare category, and sleep is more fragmented.”
If the cooler climate doesn’t help, Robbins recommends speaking to your doctor as depression, anxiety, or the drugs used to treat it could be to blame. “There are some drugs that can cause hallucinations and nightmares,” she said.
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It’s also important to prepare your body for sleep by leaving the screens on the other side of the bedroom door, taking a warm bath before bed, and paying close attention to your sleeping environment. They can even encourage your mind to find better content, Barret said. “Think about what you would like to dream about. You could choose a person that you would like to see in your dream tonight, or a favorite place. If it’s a general person, like a person or a place, just imagine that person or place, ”she said.
“If you have a certain favorite dream that you are focused on, you could try repeating it in detail before falling asleep and that would make it more likely that you would have a similar dream. That makes it more likely that you will dream about this content and it will also make it less likely that you will have anxiety dreams. “
Dave Yasvinski is a writer at Healthing.ca
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