The Sunday Read: ‘Did Covid Change How We Dream?’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2021

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the novel coronavirus spread and much of the world moved toward isolation, dream researchers began rushing to design studies and set up surveys that might allow them to access some of the most isolated places of all, the dreamscapes unfolding inside individual brains. The first thing almost everyone noticed was that for many people, their dream worlds seemed suddenly larger and more intense. One study of more than 1,000 Italians living through strict lockdown found that some 60 percent were sleeping badly — before the pandemic, only a third of Italians reported trouble sleeping — and they were also remembering more of their dreams than during normal times and reporting that those dreams felt unusually real and emotional and bizarre. Even social media sites, researchers found, were full of people surprised at how much more active and vivid their dream lives had become. “Is it just me?” many of them asked. It was not.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The laws of physics have been repealed.
0:10.5	The ocean is curling into the sky.
0:14.8	And on the other side of the water, I can see monsters, like dragons or dinosaurs.
0:21.8	The radio announcer is telling me that this was a new thing and that this phenomenon is
0:26.8	actually happening.
0:30.8	I'm in a sunny ballroom dance studio stretching.
0:34.6	Known as round, except another me.
0:38.5	And we're both holding the same pose and trying to maintain our distance from each other.
0:45.1	I was evacuating London.
0:47.5	Only I was stuck.
0:49.7	There's a ghost.
0:51.8	It's flying from apartment to apartment, moving through people and possessing them.
0:57.7	Suddenly the ghost leaps onto my balcony and into me.
1:03.2	And that's when I wake up.
1:07.7	My name is Brooke Jarvis and I'm a contributing writer for The New York Times magazine.
1:13.7	These are retellings of three different dreams that were collected last year by a dream
1:17.3	researcher named Deerger Barrett.
1:19.8	I recently wrote about her work and that of other researchers who studied dreams for
1:23.7	the magazine.
1:25.7	When the world went into lockdown during the pandemic, our sleep patterns began to change.
1:31.2	Many people noticed that they were dreaming a lot more and that their dreams were more
1:34.8	vivid.
	...

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