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.
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.