During the COVID-19 pandemic, people experiencing greater general stress, worse sleep, or more middle-of-the-night insomnia were more likely to have nightmares about specific themes such as confinement, failure, helplessness, anxiety, war, separation, totalitarianism, sickness, death, COVID, and an apocalypse. Those with worsened sleep also reported nightmares about oppression, disaster, evil forces, and domestic abuse. The findings suggest that pandemic-related stress may trigger negatively-toned dreams of particular themes, and future research could explore whether such nightmares reflect an emotion regulation mechanism or its failure.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a survey of 419 US adults examined links between sleep, stress, and dream recall. People whose sleep worsened were more likely to report both increased and decreased dream recall. Those with greater schedule regularity or sleep improvement were less likely to report decreased recall. Negative dream content, positive dream content, maintenance insomnia, and daytime sleepiness were all associated with both increased and decreased recall. Decreased recall was linked to greater insomnia severity, fatigue, sleepiness, COVID stress, anxiety, depression, worse sleep environment, and less sleep control. The authors suggest a sudden drop in dream recall in response to new stress may indicate poor sleep quality and mental health.