Today, Explained - Quarantine dreams

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Think you’ve been having exceptionally strange dreams lately? Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett says it’s not a figment of your imagination. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. The first dream I remember very vividly was a person was murdering someone next to me and sitting on me as though I was a piece of furniture. And I remember thinking to myself, I need to be as still and quiet as possible or this person is going to murder me also. So I was curled in a ball and crying,

but also hoping that the murdering person who was sitting on me wouldn't notice that I was not furniture. People have been having some really intense dreams during this pandemic. And the staff here at Vox heard about so many of these that we decided to formally do a call out for some voice memos. And we got hundreds of responses. Here are a few of our favorites. Hi, I'm Ellery. I'm 16. I'm from Manhattan, Kansas. An odd dream I had during quarantine was one of my grandmothers had a baby,

and I was told to go visit her and her baby. And I looked in the crib, and there was a dog in the crib, and I just played with the dog in her bedroom. In my dream, it was a big company meeting, and everyone was gathered in person instead of like on Webex. And they were announcing big layoffs and they had brought a special guest to tell us about it. And it was Jake Gyllenhaal of all people. My name is Ronnie. I'm 25 and I currently live in Wiesbaden, Germany. I had a dream that I went into a grocery store with a pair of tongs in my hand.

I met with a friend that I fancied at the time and tried to kiss, but my lips wouldn't work. So I had to use the tongs that I had to form my lips so that I could kiss. Now, any armchair psychologist could listen to all these dreams and say like, oh yeah, that coronavirus has you dreaming all funny, but we wanted to do better than that. This is Today Explained. So we called up a Harvard psychologist, Dr. Deirdre Barrett. All day, every day, she's thinking about one thing. Dreams. So I asked her, I asked, she's thinking about one thing. Dreams. So I asked her, I asked, is this a real thing? Are people having weird dreams? Are they just noting their dreams more than they usually do?

I definitely think people are remembering more dreams and more vivid and bizarre dreams than usual. I think two things are going on. One is that any crisis tends to stir up our dream life. That happened after 9-11. But then I think we have a larger effect superimposed on that, which is a lot of chronically sleep-deprived people are catching up on sleep. And when you cut off the last bit of your sleep, if you sleep six hours instead of eight, you don't just cut off a quarter of your dream time. Each dream cycle is getting longer through the night. So, you lose a lot of your dream time, and especially the most vivid dreams come at the end of the night. So, I think we're seeing this physical reason for a rebound in

dreaming superimposed on top of the crisis activation. And I just wonder, you know, if everyday people are having family members and friends telling them about their dreams more often, I can only imagine what your life must be like right now. Are people getting in touch with you all day to tell you about their dreams? Yeah, I'm on. I mean, obviously I have friends

who tend to talk about their dreams a lot. And I'm doing a specific study on dreams about the COVID-19 pandemic. So my online survey just asks for dreams that are about the pandemic itself. And that's what I'm looking at in the most systematic way. What made you want to do a survey about pandemic dreams? I collected dreams after 9-11 and from Kuwaitis after the Iraqi occupation. I analyzed a sample of 500 dreams from POWs in a World War II Nazi prisoner of war camp. So, it's an ongoing interest of mine, and when this started happening, it seemed very obvious that I wanted to collect dreams from this

time. Well, tell us about what you're hearing. What have you gotten from this survey and even informally from friends and family? I'm seeing clusters of different kinds of content. One common theme is just that people are dreaming that they get the virus. They are having trouble breathing or they are spiking a fever. I am not having much sleeping difficulties at the moment, but I did have a very vivid dream a couple of weeks ago. I experienced all the COVID-19 symptoms in bed. I felt some sore throat.

I felt like I had fever and started sweating and also chest pain. The next day I woke up completely healthy. Or it can be more dreamlike, like one woman looked down at her stomach and saw blue stripes on it and remembered in the dream that that's supposed to be the first sign of the virus. Then there are metaphoric stand-ins for the virus.

By far the most common one is bug attacks. I've just seen dozens and dozens of swarms of bees or hornets flying at the dreamer. Wriggling masses of worms that are toxic, armies of cockroaches running at them. So I was in some house, and I was being chased by a large flying insect that had a stinger. And I kept trying to kill it, and it wouldn't die. So I tried to drown it with water.

I tried to smash it with a book, and it just kept coming at me, and it was terrifying. What's going on with our brains when we're dreaming of being chased by bugs or insect invasions? I think that it's partly that we use the slang term bugs. I have a bug means I've got a virus. Also, I think at a deeper level that lots of little things that cumulatively could harm or kill you makes a bug attack a very good metaphor for the virus. What are you hearing beyond things that feel directly related to the virus itself,

be it getting the virus or being chased by a giant bug? I'm hearing dreams that relate more to the shelter-at-home orders. People that are by themselves at home tend to have dreams that are kind of exaggerated depictions of loneliness. Several people have dreamed they're in prison. Other people dream that their friends are all banished or sent away or abandoning them. I dreamt that I was living on a lunar base. I was there with a friend, a compatriot, and I suddenly realized that I had no idea how long the two of us had been there. One woman dreamed that she had been picked out to be the first one-person colony on Mars and was on Mars by herself. Then people who shelter with their

families, and especially ones who maybe even have additional extended family members who don't usually live with them, they tend to have crowding dreams. Like they dream that the whole neighborhood has moved in to their apartment and they can't find a place to sit or walk within their space. One woman who's actually homeschooling her own child had a dream that she got a message from the child's school that the entire class was going to move in with her through the pandemic and she was responsible for teaching the entire class. Right, a nightmare. So, the dreams just dramatize and exaggerate some of the things the person is feeling about shelter at home, about homeschooling. There was a dream where somebody was trying to buy groceries and their wallet was empty. And they remarked that it's not quite down to that, but that's

certainly what their waking worries are mostly about. I've heard a lot of people are dreaming about their exes, for example. What's up with that? I have seen a fair number of dreams about their exes, although some of them look like, I want to be with my ex, but others are just the opposite. There was one poor woman who dreamed that the authorities had decided that she could not shelter in place with her current boyfriend and she had to shelter in place with her ex-boyfriend. And he was telling her how much he hated that she'd let her leg hair grow and was berating her over minor appearance things. I dreamt that I got married to my ex and we were having a perfectly happy life together. But it's so weird because I really hate him. I just remember feeling so in love, so at ease in the dream with him. And I don't know why. What's the most surprising, bonkers, surreal, bizarre COVID-19 dream you've heard about as someone who seems to hear a lot?

My favorite dream was from a woman who dreamed that she was so angry about the virus that she turned into a giant antibody. And the anger gave her superhuman strength, so she rampaged around as this antibody, killing all the virus she could find. And she woke up with this great sense of satisfaction. What should we be taking away from all of this? Is there anything? I'm sure most people would rather not be dreaming about this pandemic, since it's pretty hard to forget about it during waking hours. Yes, I think that anxiety, dreams, and nightmares can still tell us interesting things. It's a good time to be keeping a dream journal.

You'll see patterns in what you're dreaming about. And when you start thinking about what the particular images you've dreamed about symbolize for you, or if something by day has given you that feeling in the pit of your stomach that you had when you were seeing this fantastic dream thing, it can help us get in touch with why we're more worried about some things than others. And once you're conscious of fears, it gives you a little more control over them. I saw one dream from a young woman who said she'd been paying no attention to the social distancing rules. And she had a dream that she was throwing a party and inviting all her friends. So this big party started at her house in the dream. And what she called secret agents from the government broke into the party and stopped it. And even in the dream, instead of

being upset at that, she realized that if the government had sent agents to her home, that she must have been doing something really bad. And she woke up and thought, I've got to take this seriously. There's some reason for these prohibitions. So, you know, her dream did something very useful in getting her to process those things that she'd been hearing, but not doing anything with. After the break, if you don't like the dreams you've been having, our dream doctor has some mind control type ideas for you. Support for Today Explained comes from R.A.M.P. Thank you. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month.

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Dr. Barrett, you mentioned that you've studied people's dreams after 9-11, after wars.

How do pandemic dreams compare? After 9-11, I saw many of the same patterns for the very frontline people in 9-11, the firemen and policemen and the people who barely got out alive from the lower floors. Before the building collapsed, they were having just full-on traumatic nightmares about whatever the worst they had witnessed was. And I'm seeing that in the healthcare providers now. They do have vivid images to attach to the virus of what it's like if someone is dying of it. And so their nightmares are about trying to intubate someone whose breathing

is too constricted to get a tube down them, a ventilator's failing, they feel horribly responsible for saving someone's life, and yet they really have no control over the fact that the person's dying, and just repetitive nightmares about the worst things they're experiencing by day. Yeah. I mean, I can only imagine these healthcare workers wish they could escape their living, waking realities when they're sleeping, but it sounds like they can't. Right. I think that in an evolutionary sense that post-traumatic nightmares evolved to do exactly what they're doing now that's become a problem, which is people say they feel like the traumas just happened to them

again that night. And I think that in primeval times on the savannah, that if a trauma happened, it was likely to happen again. And the idea of something that kept you absolutely on your guard and terrified and watchful that this might happen again, had a lot of survival value. If the tribe over the hill had come and invaded your village one day, it might come back the next day. If an animal had almost gotten into your hut at night, it might do so the next night. So I think that post-traumatic nightmares exist to keep us scared. But now when most traumas, some of them can't even happen again, if your house is burned down, it can't do that a second time. But even traffic accidents or rapes or things that theoretically could happen, they're no more likely to happen to that person the next

time. So I think they've become a rather maladaptive part of human nature in modern times. That's really interesting to think about how post-traumatic stress dreaming may have evolved. What about the tropes, though, like the classics, the teeth falling out or even just regular falling in a dream? Do we know what these mean? When we interpret people's dreams, it's not like a dream dictionary. I mean, there are these trashy dream dictionaries that say, oh, this means this. But dreams are very individual. So when we work with someone's dreams, we would ask them what a particular image means to them if somebody dreams about a dog we say what is a dog and one person says oh they're these cute little animals that are sort of like our children and we take care of them and the next person says they're these great big animals with sharp teeth and i got bitten by a dog when i was 10. And the third person says, they're man's best friend. They're more loyal to you than your human friends.

So you hear three very different metaphors starting to come out there. And so for each dreamer, having a dog in your dream means, you know, whatever they say when they start elaborating on a dog. And certainly some things like a dog may be positive or negative. Falling is not usually going to be positive. Although we have metaphors about falling in love and, you know, somebody's associations could go to something where they're losing control, but this is somehow in a good way because they're over-controlled. So dream interpreters help people get at their own symbols.

Does everyone dream? Have you ever come across a person who doesn't dream? I've come across a number of people who don't recall any dreams. We know from sleep lab research that if you bring someone into a sleep lab and let them get a few minutes into each period of rapid eye movement sleep and then awaken them, that most people will recall five dreams if they're sleeping eight hours. So the difference is not literally in dreaming, but our long-term memory is not turned on when we're dreaming. Only short-term is. So you have to wake up from a dream to possibly recall it. And then even if you wake up, if you turn your attention to anything else first, it usually doesn't get transferred into longer-term memory.

So there are huge differences in dream recall. But except for the differences produced by just how many hours you sleep, they're not big ones in dreaming. Do we need to be dreaming? Are we working stuff out that needs to be expelled from our minds when we dream? Is it essential to good sleep? I mean, how necessary is it to dream? I think that when you ask things about what is dreaming for, that it's interesting to think about the parallel question about what is waking thought for? I think they're both for everything in a sense that we're thinking in this extremely

different biochemical state, but we're still concerned with all of our usual thoughts and concerns and hopes and fears and emotional stuff and social relationships and objective problems and professional stuff. And just like with waking thought, dreams are thinking about it and a lot of the thought is circular and repetitive or silly and not particularly useful. But some of the processing, just like some of waking thought, ends up making a breakthrough for us or really processing stuff in a new way. One difference that comes to mind here is how much more vulnerable we are when we're asleep. I mean, when you're daydreaming, you can control your thoughts a bit better, no? It's interesting. Most people have much more conscious control

over their daydreams than their nightdreams. Our nighttime dreams are usually coming from much deeper in our unconscious. But I think that's one thing that makes our dream thought especially useful. It's not that it's a better mode of thinking than awake, but because it's so very different and we don't censor it in the same ways, it sometimes takes us to associations that we would be blocking if we were just thinking about it awake. Can we control them? Do you have any tips for people who would like to, you know, steer their dreams away from nightmares? You definitely can influence your dreams. It doesn't happen perfectly on demand every single night that you try to influence content. But if you're bothered

by a lot of anxiety dreams about the current pandemic, the best way to deal with that is to think of what you would like to dream about. Maybe there's a person you'd like to be visiting with tonight. Maybe you'd like to be in a certain beautiful place. Lots of people like flying dreams. So just think what you would like to dream tonight. And then as you're falling asleep, form a mental image of that because images make their way to our dreaming mind easier than words. So picture that person's face or that place or flying and just drift off to sleep thinking, I want to dream about this tonight. I want to dream about this tonight. I want to dream about this tonight. I want to dream about this tonight.

And that both makes it likelier that you will dream on the chosen topic and also less likely that you'll have more anxiety dreams. Dr. Barrett, thank you so much for helping us understand our dreams. And I don't usually end interviews this way, but sweet dreams. Same to you. And no falling and no antibodies killing you. Yeah, no X's, please. Dr. Deirdre Barrett is a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. You can take her survey on COVID-19 dreams at surveymonkey.com. The URL is a little survey funky,

but what the heck, here it is. SurveyMonkey.com slash r slash b8s75cn. One more time, that's SurveyMonkey.com slash r slash b8s75cn. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm, but my friends call me B8S75CN. The rest of the Today Explained team includes The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder handles the rest of the bops, Cecilia Lay handles the facts, and Liz Kelly Nelson is the editorial director of all the Vox podcasts.

If you weren't already aware, Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I had a dream that we were playing some kind of game or some kind of competition, but instead of using a ball or something normal, we were throwing a bagel at each other. And I guess the point was to get the other person to not catch it, so it ended up being these wild tosses with spinning it

or ricocheting it off the wall or doing some kind of trick move. So it was like catch, but the point was to not catch. Yeah. And the ball was a bagel. Yeah. And I have no idea if we were just trying to pass the time or if there was something at stake, you know? That was the lighthearted part of the dream.