For millions of people around the world facing the pandemic of the new coronavirussleeping does not provide any relief.
The horrors of Covid-19 and the surreal and terrifying ways in which everyday life has been disrupted are infecting dreams and exposing feelings of fear, isolation, and grief that transcend culture, language, and national borders.
Everyone from a university professor in Pakistan to a postal worker in Canada to an Episcopal priest in Florida faces the same demon. Everyone wakes up in the middle of the night covered in sweat.
Experts noted that in human history they have rarely been experienced “Collective dreams” on such a scale and, of course, never while having the ability to express those nightmares to others in real time.
The psychological cost is alarming, especially for health workers, whose dreams show similarities to those of war veterans and first responders in the September 11, 2001 attacks, said Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard professor who studies the phenomenon in the world and has collected 6,000 dreams from 2,400 people.
So many people are sharing their dreams on social media that there is a Twitter account that brings them together in a virtual library under the title “I Dream of COVID”.
“To my knowledge, no one has any signs of dreams of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which would probably be the most comparable,” said Barrett, who has studied the dreams of 9/11 survivors and those of British prisoners of war from the Second World War. World War. “Now you have the cell phone by the bed, and you can record it or write it. It has never been so easy to record our dreams, “he added.
Dreams also bring to light what most disturbs us about the pandemic. And the themes seem to be universal.
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Those with a safe place suddenly overwhelmed by the virus reflect the terrible invisibility of contagion, according to Cathy Caruth, a Cornell University professor who has studied psychological trauma for 30 years. The dreams caused by the pandemic recall the experience of Hiroshima survivors, who feared being exposed to invisible radiation and the nightmares described by Vietnam veterans.
“They seem to be partly about things that are difficult to understand, which means that anyone can be a threat and that one can be a threat to others,” said Caruth.
Episcopalian priest Mary Alice Mathison dreamed that 500 people attended a funeral at her church and refused to go home. Other dreams reveal that no one knows how the pandemic will end. In those, the dreamer often wakes up with a start.
In the Pakistani province of Punjab, a literature teacher dreamed that she was one of just 100 people on the planet who did not have COVID-19. The infected population had gained political control and was persecuting the uninfected “so that the world would be the same for everyone,” said Roha Rafiq, 28.
According to Barrett, many dream that they are sick with COVID-19 or are covered in things that seem to represent the virus: swarms of insects or worms, witches or grasshoppers with teeth. Some dream that they are in public places without a mask or without proper social distancing.
“Health personnel are the most like a traumatized population,” said Barrett. “They have nightmares in which they relive their experiences and … all with the theme that ‘I am responsible for saving this person’s life and I do not succeed and the person is about to die,'” he said.
He added that “when they dream that the sick person is their son or their parents, they say that there is always a next step in the dream when they understand that …” I infected them. “
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