Why our dreams have become so surreal
The coronavirus crisis isn’t only affecting us in our waking hours.
At 1.30am the other night, I sat bolt upright, sweating. I had woken from a vivid dream where I was stuck in a tiny glass lift, so snug all around and so low above my head, that I couldn’t move and there was hardly room to breathe. A week earlier, a nightmare involved me trying repeatedly to phone my boyfriend to rescue me from some unspecified threat – but I kept dialling the wrong number (hundreds of times). Both were very unsettling.
Now, I’ve always had dreams – both pleasant, and not – throughout “peace time”. But they seem to be more vivid, and detailed, in the time of Covid-19. And it seems I’m not alone: the Google query, “Why am I having weird dreams lately?” has quadrupled in the last week.
I asked friends if they’d had similar experiences. Almost all agreed. Some of them were hilariously surreal. Two examples: “I had a dream last night that my friend had shrunk her husband to the size of a baby and was carrying him around.” Or this: “We all went on holiday to a Soviet holiday camp and bumped into Kate Beckinsale, who told me she was still married to my husband and was fuming she hadn’t received the
£28 milion separation settlement.”
One acquaintance, with Left-wing sympathies, dreamt she was having an affair with Boris Johnson – but only in order to bring down the Government.
However, the majority reported dreams based on domestic life that seemed to show frustration, anxiety or fear: not being able to find the toothbrush, being in an out-of-control speeding car, or having to sit an exam they hadn’t revised for.
“I’ve been having very vivid dreams about being really late for work and getting into trouble with my boss,” said a colleague. “When I’m dreaming, it’s almost as though I’m half asleep and I’m half awake. When I do wake up, it takes me a while to figure out whether it was a dream or something that actually happened.”
So what is going on here? Could it be that lockdown is just a fantasy and Boris will walk out the shower, Bobby Ewing style, and tell us it has all just been a dream? More likely, something interesting is going on in our brains.
Guy Leschziner is a consultant neurologist, sleep physician and
Now we have time to recall our dreams, talk about them... and write them down
author of The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience and the
Secret World of Sleep. “Scientists believe that dreams happen in ‘active’ REM sleep, as opposed to ‘normal’ sleep,” he says. “The brainwaves of a person in REM sleep look almost as if they are awake. The dreams we have in light sleep are like bitty vignettes. But in REM sleep, they have more of a narrative structure.”
Sleep scientists hypothesise we’ve been getting more REM sleep since lockdown started and don’t have to leave the house for work or the school run. “We tend to do most of our REM sleep in the latter part of the night,” says Leschziner. “Historically, most people are sleep-deprived: woken up before it is natural by our alarm clocks. Now many of us don’t have to get up early, we have ‘REM rebound’.”
Michael Grandner, director of the University of Arizona’s sleep programme, puts it thus: “Before, we might have stopped the movie before we got to the interesting part. Now, we might not be doing that.”
External factors are also playing a part. “Dreams are our brains processing and organising things,” says Grandner. “Dumped in this new environment, we are struggling to figure our place in it.”
The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t help. A 2007 Science Daily report of college students in post-9/11 America revealed that for every hour of television viewed on September 11, stress levels – indicated by dream content – increased significantly. Says Leschziner: “You can’t withdraw yourself from all news, but it’s important to find a balance.”
Both Grandner and Leschziner agree that anxious people wake up more at night, and therefore remember their dreams. “Plus, we are normally so focused on getting up and getting out of the house that we don’t record them,” says Leschziner. “Now we have time to recall them, talk about them, and write them down.” According to a report in National
Geographic there has been a 35 per cent increase in dream recall since the pandemic began. While some people report having pleasantly surreal dreams – or even none at all – many are having nightmares right now, which are widely known to follow trauma. But this may not be a bad thing. “Dreams are a kind of overnight therapy,” says Leschziner. “They are normal, not pathological. People with post-traumatic stress disorder constantly wake up during the night. Therefore they don’t adequately process their emotional experiences.”
And while certain people may be traumatised – NHS staff on the front line seeing death on a daily basis, for example – Leschziner feels that most of us are haunted by a vaguer sense of invisible menace. This causes anxiety, rather than acute distress.
So can we control our dreams? Not entirely, but we can reduce anxiety. “Think about what relaxes you,” says Leschziner. Exercise helps, as does keeping to a bedtime routine, and not watching the late news. “Basic ‘sleep hygiene’ – limiting caffeine, avoiding screens before bed, not going to bed hungry, going to bed at the same time each night – can lead to a better night,” he says.
At some point, the world will go back to “normal”, but, says Leschziner, job insecurity and the continued health risk means anxiety may persist in a lesser form. So prepare yourself for some more interesting nights ahead.