Dreaming during Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dreams reveals mental suffering and fear of contagion
medRxiv May 21, 2020 Natália Bezerra Mota, Janaína Weissheimer, Marina Ribeiro et al. 7 citations preprint
Dreams during the COVID-19 pandemic contained a higher proportion of anger and sadness words and were semantically more similar to the terms contamination and cleanness compared to dreams from before the outbreak. These dream features were associated with mental suffering related to social isolation, explaining 39% of the variance in negative symptoms measured by the PANSS scale. The findings suggest that pandemic dreams reflect mental suffering, fear of contagion, and changes in daily habits.