The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Have you had a maskless dream? You’re not alone
Joy McGann has had the same dream multiple times since the start of the pandemic.
“I suddenly find myself in a very crowded public place like a grocery store or public gym,” said McGann, of Stamford. “I gasp in horror as I realize the masses around me are not wearing masks and I touch my own face to realize I'm not either. In abject panic, I try to hold my breath and leave the situation. At this point, I wake up.”
Westport’s Jo Ann Flaum has also had a pandemic dream, also about masks.
“I dreamt I had gone to visit a friend,” she said. “The only way I could see her was to enter her house, which I wasn't happy about, but I figured I'd stay right at the door, distanced from her. When I walked into her house I found it filled with (maskless, non-distanced) people. It was very upsetting. I was glad to wake up.”
In fact, pandemic dreams, particularly those involving masks, have been very common worldwide for more than a year now, according to Dierdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University and author of “Pandemic Dreams.”
“They're really the most common theme now,” she said. “They appeared pretty early on.”
All the way back in March 2020, Barrett set up an online survey asking people to share their pandemicrelated dreams. Since then, she’s logged just shy of 7,000 individual dreams.
What she has found are themes, trends that tend to follow what people are experiencing locally.
“Some of the changes in the dreams map very clearly to the changes in restrictions, what's going on in the waking world, whether masks or washing is being suggested, what social distance is being recommended,” she said.
In places where lockdowns have been short-lived, there are fewer of what Barrett called “the lonely at home” kinds of dreams. “Definitely some of them very closely mirrored what the restrictions and warnings were,” she said. “Others changed, I think, at least partly based on how long it's been going on and more psychological factors.”
As the pandemic progressed, so did the nature of people’s dreams
“Some of the changes in the dreams map very clearly to the changes in restrictions, what’s going on in the waking world, whether masks or washing is being suggested, what social distance is being recommended.” Dierdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University and author of “Pandemic Dreams”
about it. At the start, the dreams were often expressions of anxiety about catching the coronavirus.
Some were literal: “I'm dreaming that I can't breathe or I'm dreaming that I'm spiking a fever, or something, like I looked down at my stomach. It has blue stone on it, I remember that that's the first sign of a COVID infection,” Barrett said.
In those more literal dreams, which Barrett said were “by far” the most common at the beginning of the pandemic, there were often specific variations. Perhaps a child was coming down with COVID, or a parent.
But there were also metaphorical COVID dreams. Bug attacks were a very common theme.
“There were lots of bugs attack dreams, and they're very unique to this,” Barrett said. “I did not see bug attacks after 9/11 or other crises. They really seem to be kind of specific. Partly a pun, I think, on ‘I'm coming down with a bug,’ but also just lots of little particles that cumulatively can harm or kill you is a very good metaphor for the virus.”
Toward the end of spring last year, Barrett started hearing about lockdown-related dreams, people “dreaming that they were being thrown in prison, especially solitary confinement.”
“They were dreaming that they were being forced to be a one-person Mars colony and sent to Mars alone,” she said. “Just very vivid dramatizations of extreme isolation.”
People who were isolating in groups, with family members perhaps, had the opposite dream: “The other cluster that were sheltering with families and roommates and all, they tend to dream these exaggerated narratives of overcrowding and lack of privacy also sort of amped up,” Barrett said.
Maybe the dream is that the whole neighborhood moved into the house, or rooms are crowded with cars. Or, “I'm trying to use the toilet and I can't get the door closed, because everybody’s stuff is jamming the doorway.”
Around the holidays, older people reported dreams about their families coming to their homes sick. When schools and offices started reopening, anxiety was expressed in that context.
“Often it was the first day back at work, was what the dream was about. It could either be kind of realistic, my co-workers look pale and they're coughing and I'm afraid they have COVID and will give it to me,” Barrett said. “Or it could be very bizarre things that were wrong with the office. The carpet is wet and filthy, and they have a new rule because of the pandemic that we take off our shoes and socks at the door and walk over this disgusting carpet all day.”
None of these themes have ever truly disappeared, but waxed and waned as restrictions were put in place and then loosened. But maskless dreams have been the most common and have remained so, appearing in about 50 percent of all the dreams shared with Barrett.
“The maskless dreams appeared early on, but the mask dreams early on could be, ‘I don't have a mask,’ ‘someone else doesn't have a mask’ and, almost equally, ‘I've gotten too close to someone or someone's crowding in too close to me,’” she said.
There is an element of fear to some of the dreams, but for some people the social anxiety outweighed any fear of the pandemic.
“Some people were sad and lonely, even more strongly than they were afraid,” Barrett said. “Other people were irritated and stressed at the crowding and the lack of privacy, even more than they were afraid of the virus. So, it's how we process however it's affecting us personally, but that really is different for different individuals.”
It makes sense that people are dealing with the pandemic in their dreams, according to Karen Steinberg Galluci, an associate professor of psychiatry at UConn Health. Pandemic nightmares might be unsettling, but they’re not a bad thing.
“Dreaming is our mind’s way of trying to transform and process difficult psychic material,” she said. “I see it as a sign of healing, trying to heal.”
Dreaming is, she said, how our unconscious minds deal with whatever is taking our focus during the day. It might be the pandemic, or it might be relationships or work, or an amalgam of all of that and more.
“Probably Freud was one of the first people to write about dreams, and he called them the ‘royal road to the unconscious,’” Steinberg Galluci said. “He felt that dreams served a variety of functions, one of which is to deal with the residue of the day, what goes on and what is unfinished, perhaps. That comes out in our dreams.”
Perhaps it’s an expression of Barrett’s own intense focus that she dreams of dreams, and of dream research.
“I dream that I'm leading dream discussion groups and people close their eyes and show rapid eye movement. I tell dreams to people who interpret my dream to me,” she said. “And people come and tell me bizarre theories of what dreams are in dreams. And I specifically dreamed about the survey once, but I dream about dreams in general.”