Should We Be Afraid of Our Dreams?
Monday March 30th, 11:09 a.m., about a week into quarantine:
“Wait, I’m freaking out.
I have had the weirdest dreams here every night.”
11:11 “Wait I’ve been having weird dreams too.
11:12 I don’t remember last night’s, but it was something about my birthday dinner and we were doing a fajita potluck at this fancy steak restaurant. But then I realized no one could come because of corona.”
A series of texts describing everyone’s latest dreams streams in. Everyone has a series of their latest dreams to report
11:17 “It’s lack of stimulation and stress related.”
11:18 “Less stress means more dreams?”
11:20 “Wait, this article says more stress equals dreams. Which is weird bc I’m not stressed at all right now.”
11:20 “No, I know. But you are. I think stress doesn't mean anxiety it can mean a stress which is like something that’s not the norm in your lifestyle. Aka this whole thing is not normal and a major stress on our lives.
In a span of 10 minutes, everyone in the group chat felt simultaneously comforted and more lost. It’s not abnormal to share a crazy or funny dream once in a while, but for all eleven friends to be experiencing dreams on almost every weekday night? Bizarre.
The dreams of my peers intersect so closely with reality, making them more uncanny than simply a dream about flying or the latest show you’re binging. They reflect certain aspects of daily life to an extreme, disorienting level.
Karen Konkoly, a second-year graduate student in professor Ken Paller’s psychology lab, currently sees an upward trend of people remembering their dreams and having more bad dreams. But bad doesn’t mean there is something to be worried about. “I would define bad as a dream in which there is a predominant negative emotion,” she says. “There’s an interesting disconnect: if you have a bunch of people report those dreams and give them to blind readers, the readers might rate them as much more negative than those who experienced them. Negative events might happen in your dream but you don’t feel that negatively about it yourself.”
Why do we remember these dreams more right now? It has to do with how people are sleeping, she says. You have more dreams when the brain is closer to being awake, and fragmented sleep happens more with more stress and not as much stimulation during the day. Another reason has to do with that some people are sleeping later in the morning, meaning they’re probably getting more sleep during the rapid eye movement period (REM) resulting in more dreams.
Konkoly suggests that we have more dreams right now because there are more emotions to process, even if we may not explicitly think there are. Even if stress has declined because of a universal pass/fail mandate, dreams allow people to process information from throughout the day. So if we are taking in less information during the day (we can all admit Zoom classes don’t compare to in-class stimulation), we have less to process, so we perhaps start dreaming about larger constructs, and search our memories since daily ones aren’t as interesting.
“Here’s my conjecture: dreams are perceptual, so when trying to perceive the abstract in your life it becomes super crazy,” Konkoly says. “Abstract, emotional things being perceived become more bizarre.
“You might not be having dreams symbolic of coronavirus, but you are still having more tangible dreams because you are processing stress that is related to the virus. Getting organized, for example, is symbolic about it but not metaphorical,” she says.
Rachael Cook, a junior at Penn State and the President of Panhellenic there, has dreams about her meetings, interviews, and issues she’s solving. “They’re so realistic and on point that I wake up actually thinking I have to finish the tasks from my dreams,” she says. Has the dream world become more high-intensity than the real world?
Others though are completely random, Cook said. “I had a dream the other night that I was trapped in the show 90 Day Fiancé and my family would not let me come home because I had to respect my contract. Very weird.”
Nothing has changed about her bedtime routine, except for the fact she’s back in her high school bedroom and doesn’t brush her teeth with her friends.
Cook feels normal about it all. From conversations with friends to articles and posts on Instagram about vivid dreams during quarantine, Cook does not feel alone. There’s no sense of insecurity, even as she learns that stress and anxiety root these weird dreams during quarantine.
“Well last night I had a dream that I was in Evanston but it didn’t look like Evanston,” says junior Ellie Klien. “I was with my family and there were rumors of yearly killing?”
In Klien’s dream, she went to bed, and people were giving shots to those sleeping so they would not remember things going on. But her shot didn't work.
“So I heard and knew everything and basically my mom and her sister were killing this random dude and moved his body and everything. I didn’t wanna make any noise or show them I was awake but someone was legit being killed. So the next day I told my grandma and she said, ‘oh they do that every year’ and I was like what?”
In her dream she began googling the man killed online to see if any leads pointed towards her family.
There’s no real point to try and stop these dreams from happening. If you do not have the same repetitive dream and the dream does not affect your daily life’s anxieties or abilities, nothing is wrong. The concept of sleep hygiene (i.e. no blue light before bed, having a routine, meditation etc.) related to deepening one’s sleep won’t have much of an effect on dreaming, Konkoly says. So practicing your yoga before bed, wearing a new pajama set and following a strict nighttime skin routine to “prep” for bedtime won’t change your dreams.
Klein doesn’t see a need to change her bedtime routine in a way to “prevent” these dreams or change her sleeping habits. As scary as this may seem, Klein doesn’t define her dreams as violent or disappointing, just absurd. They’re simply illogical.
Illogical. Things we don’t understand naturally frighten us. Not being able to explain the details of this virus scare us. Trying to create order in this chaos overwhelms us. Yet, does illogical here do the exact opposite, giving us more clarity and understanding? Does knowing our dreams come from a place of confusion actually work to comfort us although they still make no sense and perhaps never will?
Dreams also refer to our goals and hopes, which are anything but illogical. So how do we grapple with these incoherent stories that we experience at night with this moment in history where dreams, in a goal-oriented sense, seem farther away for those that have lost jobs, loved ones and are struggling during this time, yet more potent for others as they determine and lead our way out of the pandemic. Everything becomes blurred.
The bizarre dreaming many of us experience during this time, should not be thought of as bad things, Konkoly says. These dreams are clearly indicators of us processing the many changes and new habits we are adopting. Dreams internalize these new norms, helping people learn about ways of acting.
But as our weird dreaming indicates, that’s ok, because it’s natural to our physiological well-being, just as this moment of indecision, lack of motivation for some while spring of creativity for others, does not indicate good or bad. Illogical at times becomes logical. Our dreaming right now serves as that reminder that confusion does not have to mean we are doing something wrong. Confusion is natural.