During the COVID-19 pandemic, dreams did not become more threatening or nightmarish overall compared to before the pandemic. Analysis of 1,132 pandemic-era dreams and 166 pre-pandemic dreams found no differences in the number of threatening events, disease-related threats, or severity of threats between the two periods. However, the minority of dreams that directly referenced the pandemic did contain more threats, disease-related threats, and severe threats. The findings suggest the pandemic's impact on dream content was limited to a subset of dreams rather than causing a general increase in threatening dream content.
Across the wake-sleep cycle, the positivity bias typical of waking experiences diminishes. Mind-wandering episodes are more positively valenced than dreams, and both are more negatively valenced than active wakefulness. When participants rated their own affect, all episodes were predominantly positive. However, analysis of verbal reports describing the same experiences showed a shift from positively valenced waking reports to affectively balanced mind-wandering reports to negatively valenced dream reports. These findings indicate that the nature of affective experiences depends on the measurement method and the state of consciousness, calling for integration across emotion, mind-wandering, and dream research.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, individual factors such as life satisfaction and positive emotions were better predictors of threatening dream content than daily situational factors like worry about the virus or media consumption. In a large Finnish sample using prospective dream diaries, lower life satisfaction was the only statistically significant predictor for threatening events in dreams, and fewer positive emotions in the past two weeks was the only significant predictor for pandemic-related threatening events. These findings suggest that the tendency to experience threatening dreams is more of a stable trait than a daily fluctuating feature, consistent with the threat simulation theory of dreaming.
Dreams collected at home upon morning awakening are more emotional and more negative than those collected in the lab after early REM sleep awakenings, but not more emotional than those after late REM awakenings. Home dreams also contain a higher density of emotions than lab dreams from either early or late REM sleep. The differences in overall emotionality may be due to the time of night, while the causes of differences in emotion density and negativity—whether from the sleep environment, reporting procedures, or time spent in a sleep stage—remain unclear.